CreamCloud0
Hero
untrue, a complication is still a complication even if you have people who are skilled enough that dealing with it isn't an issue.
D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.
- Thread starter Reynard
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It's simply false to say that the runes are simultaneously good and bad. They may be good. They may be bad. They may be neither - perhaps, as the players (and their PCs) conjectured of the ochre writing in my TB2e game, they are just a note left by an Orc telling any passing Bugbear to leave its stuff alone. But the are one or the other of these things. It's just that, until the dice have been rolled, no one knows what they are.
By way of comparison: sometimes, in classic D&D play, a player knows that the GM has rolled a "6" on the wandering monster die: the GM's face betrays it, or they say something, or whatever. Now, the player waits while the GM rolls on the wandering monster table. And it would be simply false to say that, at that moment of play, the monster the PCs are about to encounter is simultaneously a Kobold and a Goblin and a giant rat and a giant ant and a . . . it is what it is, but at that point no one at the table, not even the GM, knows what is about to come around the corner.
We could imagine a similar variant of the rune example. Suppose that the GM using a random dungeon generator: the PCs enter the room, the GM rolls on the table, and it mentions runes, and the GM says "You see some strange runes on the wall", and then the GM turns to the strange runes subtable and rolls to see what effect/meaning the runes have - and now the GM knows, but the players don't. There was a period in that episode of play (analogous to the wandering monster roll in the previous paragraph) where everyone knows there are strange runes, but no one knows what they do.
In each of these cases, there is uncertainty: the runes could be good, or bad, or neither; the monster about to come around the corner could be a Kobold, or a Goblin, or a giant rat, or a giant ant. But the truth of x could be A or x could be B does not entail (in ordinary English usage; or in any system of logic I'm familiar with) that x is both A and B.
Hence, and to reiterate, the description of the runes as simultaneously good or bad, rather than using the language of possibility, is just false. Likewise it would be false, in the climbing example that I posted about just upthread, to say that the rock that crumbles under the character's weight - but that would not be narrated as crumbling had the player succeeded on their check - is simultaneously able to bear the character's weight and unable to bear the character's weight. It gets narrated as one, or the other, based on the dictates of the play process (in that particular example, the roll to climb).
As I posted already in reply to you, there is an obvious difference in how the shared fiction is established. This is not in doubt. I was posting about it 1000s of post up in this thread, when contrasting map-and-key with other ways of establishing shared fiction, deciding the content of the scenes/situations the GM presents to the players, etc. Before talking about difference of process, though, I will talk about what all these RPGing processes have in common.
The rune example, the wandering monster, the crumbling rock example example: they all take advantage of the following way in which fiction, being authored differs from reality, being real:
In reality, there is often epistemic uncertainty which does not correspond to metaphysical uncertainty. I put the pudding in the oven 30 minutes ago: it is baked all the way through? There is a metaphysical fact of the matter; but I don't know what it is. I throw the die - will it come up 6? There is a metaphysical fact of the matter - the physics of a thrown and falling die are deterministic - but I don't know what it is. (That's why a deterministic process can nevertheless serve as a randomiser.)
In the real world, epistemic doubt is resolved by having the appropriate sort of encounter with the metaphysical truth. Eg I look in the oven and inspect the pudding and thereby, as a result of sensory processes, come to know that the budding is baked (or not, as the case may be); or, the die lands, I look at its upwards face and thereby, as a result of sensory processes, come to know whether or not it came up 6.
Another example: suppose that I've lost my keys. They could be upstairs in the pocket of my jacket that I hung in the cupboard last night after coming home; or they could be downstairs in the gap between the couch and the wall, having been put down on the arm of the couch when I came in and before I hung up my jacket, and having been knocked off the arm of the couch without anyone noticing. My search for my keys, in this case, relies on the fact that there is a metaphysical truth, which - if I put myself into the appropriate sort of circumstance (eg reaching my hand into my pocked, or between the couch and the wall) - will impress itself upon me via a sensory process, thus enabling me to resolve my epistemic uncertainty.
It's obvious that , in these cases, no one would ever describe the pudding as being both cooked and uncooked, or the dice as landing both 6 and 1, or my keys as being simultaneously upstairs and downstairs. There is epistemic doubt, but a metaphysical truth.
When it comes to fiction, by way of contrast with reality, there is nothing but what is authored together with what is taken, by dint of permissible inferences, to follow from what is authored. So the relationship between epistemic and metaphysical uncertainty is more-or-less reversed: rather than discovery of the metaphysical truth resolving epistemic doubt, it is the resolution of epistemic doubt - by dint of making a decision about what to author, and thus what shall be the case in the fiction - that establishes the metaphysical truth of the fiction.
For instance, when writing their dungeon key, the GM wonders "Should there be anything interesting in this room?" and decides "Yes, I'll put in some strange runes. What should I have them do?" And then the GM thinks some more, perhaps reads the symbol spell description, and then decides that the runes shall have <such-and-such an effect>." The GM didn't resolve their uncertainty about the content of the room by inspecting the room, as one would inspect the baking pudding or the thrown die; nor resolve their uncertainty about the effect of the runes by inspecting the runes, as one would inspect the Rosetta Stone. They resolved their uncertainty by making a series of authorial decisions - thus forming beliefs about the contents of the imaginary room - which then settle the question of what is true in the fiction.
Although the relationship between belief and truth is reversed in the fictional case, it nevertheless remains the case that it would be false to say that it was ever the case that the room both did and did not contain runes, or that the runes were both good and bad. There is simply the GM resolving uncertainty by making decisions.
In my example of play, a different authorship process is used. Rather than the GM deciding - whether in advance, or on the spot - the player expresses their PC's hope, and then the rules of the game are applied to find out if the PC's hope is realised or dashed. (In this particular game, that took the form of a roll by the player against the Doom Pool.)
If someone's preference for RPGing is that the GM tell them things that the GM has authored, rather than that the fiction be established in some other way, that of course is their prerogative. But these different methods whereby the shared fiction is established don't change the metaphysical character of the fiction: it is what it is because there was an idea of runes, and a curiosity about what they might be, and an authorship decision made that answered that curiosity. And as the wandering monster example, and the crumbling rock example, illustrate, some of those authorial decisions are going to be made during the course of play, rather than as part of prep. And as the crumbling rock example illustrates, some of those decisions are going to be made as a result of rolls that the players make.
Specifying the precise boundaries of the preference that accepts narration of crumbling rocks on a failed climbing check, but does not want the nature of the runes to be established by a player making a roll to see whether their PC's hope that the runes show a way out of the dungeon is true, is therefore not a straightforward matter.
People like what they like. But that doesn't make their false descriptions true. It is no more quantum than any other process of play where the fiction is created as an output of the play process, rather than inputted into the play process.
Part of the difference is that, in the example I gave, (i) the player's hope (as their PC in the situation) and (ii) the player's roll, are part of the process for creating the fiction. But even that's not a full description of the difference, because in the crumbling rock example not only does the player's roll factor in, but also the player's hope (as their PC): the player hoped that their PC would get to the top, and implicit in this hope was that no rocks would crumble under the PC's weight.
It is very subtle. I think that some of it is related to expectations and a resulting sense of salience: there is no expectation that the details of the rock face will be worked out by the GM in advance, and no one cares about the state of the rocks in themselves, and so it is left for the GM to narrate the rocks as holding firm, or as crumbling, based on the roll. Whereas the content of the runes is expected to be something significant in itself - a mystery/puzzle for the players to solve, like the riddle at the gates of Moria - and thus the GM is expected to have an answer to the riddle prepared.
An example I was looking at recently, which can be used to bring one's thinking about the runes and the rock face closer together, is the chess room in the old module Ghost Tower of Inverness. The rock face could be resolved like the chess room: the GM actually details all the ledges and holds on the rock face, and presents a picture/diagram to the player, and the player has to guess or somehow infer which holds are firm and which will crumble, and actually describe which path their PC takes in the climb. Perhaps a dice roll would still be required - to see if the PC manages to actually attain the holds that the player chooses for them to use - but in this case a failure on the roll could no be narrated as rocks crumbling under the PC's weight. Because that narration would be have to follow simply from the GM's notes about the properties of the holds. A failed roll would have to be narrated as the something else - the PC's muscles are too tired, or they can't quite stretch the distance, or their hand slips with sweat, or whatever.
And we could flip it around: a chess room could be resolved not by way of presenting a diagram and having the player make choices about where their PC walks, but rather by having the player make an INT (or Tactical Games or whatever) check, and if it fails the failure is narrated as the PC stepping on the wrong square, but if it succeeds then the PC has stepped on the correct squares. Abstract this approach to resolution of a puzzle room enough, and it starts to look like the abstracted climbing check, where we take it for granted that their could be parts of the rock that appear to offer holds, but that will crumble under the PC's weight. And abstract it further, and it starts to look like the runes example.
EDIT: @clearstream, upthread I think you asked me what I mean by metaphysics of fiction. This post illustrates that, I think, and also the contrast between process of authorship and metaphysics of fiction (which are properties of fictions regardless of particular authorship processes).
This makes no sense. Surprise depends on whether or not a modified roll beats a target number. Thus it is the relationship between the roll, the modifier and the target number that determine surprise. This is no different to any other resolution/determination process in a RPG.
If you are saying that the roll doesn't determine surprise, you are also committed to saying that the roll doesn't determine whether or not a PC's attack hits a monster - it is the monster's AC that does that! Given that I've never heard you or anyone else say this sort of thing about attack rolls, I'm not taking it seriously in the context of surprise.
Although, as per my long post just upthread, this is still too simple.
When the GM narrates firm holds, or crumbling holds, depending on whether or not the climb check succeeds or fails, that is shaping the fiction to respond to (i) the roll and (ii) the player's hope for what the roll would achieve.
But very few "sim" players object to this. That is, very few "sim" players want to resolve a climb as they would resolve a classic dungeon's chess room.
It is extremely subtle.
I don't think this is right at all.
What @Hussar is expressing is a classic "mechanical simulationist" viewpoint. From [urk=[URL="https://www.arkenstonepublishing.net/isabout/2020/05/14/observations-on-gns-simulationism/#13-mechanical-simulation]Tuovinen's"]Observations on GNS Simulationism – Correspondence is about Diligence[/URL] blog[/url]:
“Mechanical simulation” means having the players expend significant time and effort quantifying, formalizing and then calculating outcomes for all sorts of fictional things. The enjoyment is in witnessing the mathematical structure of the game engine in action, and its dance with the game fiction.
In RuneQuest, when an attack is made we know whether or not it was parried/dodged (the attack/parry dice tell us that), and if it hits where the opponent was struck (the hit location die tells us that) and what effect the strike had on the opponent (the damage dice, in conjunction with the rules for the effects of damage on body parts, tells us that).
The contrast with D&D hp combat is in my view very striking. It's why games like RQ and RM have the mechanics that they have: so that the process of resolution also actually tells us what is happening in the fiction.
This provides an illustration of why I find the phrase "narrative game" unhelpful. I described a particular game using particular techniques - MHRP (Cortex+ Heroic). In the same post, I described a different game that uses different techniques - Torchbearer 2e. But TB2e still uses a version of "fail forward", although it also relies much more heavily on GM authority over backstory than MHRP or even Burning Wheel. (This is part of its homage to classic D&D.)
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
....
Which is literally what was being described.
There IS a cook around, somewhere--her position isn't quantum, it is not currently known, in part because they're probably moving about. You don't precisely know where. Full success? You hear the cook tooling around and waited until they were gone. Partial success? Well, at least in Dungeon World, we have player's choice of contextually-appropriate danger, suspicion, or cost: danger could be "you stumble right into the cook you didn't hear", suspicion could be "you pass yourself off as a new-hire handyman, but the cook is going to be checking that you're doing actual work around the house", and cost (as I referenced before) could be "you sacrifice one of your lockpicks, making it harder to pick any future locks, but you're able to slink away before the cook sees anything amiss." It depends on: what makes sense, what develops the situation in a way that invites action on the player's(/players') part(s), and what unexpected things come out of player action (sometimes, but not always, because of die rolls).
I refer you to @Maxperson's example of the "quantum crumbling rock" for climbing. It is impossible, when playing D&D in anything even close to its conventional method, for every bit of fiction to be specified in advance and treated as an input into the resolution process.
The divide then is that I don't need, nor do I want the rules the rules to describe the fiction for much of what's going on. I need the rules to tell me what happens and what the results are, I can add the descriptions for most things.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Only if the end results are all that matters to you. Is that how it is?
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