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

[FrogReaver]

On the runes, I’m thankful for the example because it’s the clearest example yet of exactly what we claim is happening in narrativist games actually occurring. 100x better than the old Evards Black Tower example which always gets muddled in the ‘memory’ side discussion.

Addressing the ‘it’s not unusual for players to get what they hope for’ counterpoint. I don’t disagree but there’s an extremely important difference. In D&D if a player wants to for example have their PC to climb then they know the rules allow for that specific hope on a successful athletics check. In this sense you are seeing selection bias. Players only hope for outcomes they can realistically achieve, leaving a huge range of potential hopes as ‘invalid’, such that even if they hope for them there is no chance of achieving them and so they simply don’t hope for them.

Essentially that there’s some things they are good with hoping for and having come to be on a successful roll doesn’t mean there aren’t many other things for which that’s not so.

The answer to the difference ultimately comes back to - the hoped for thing being rolled for must be something the character would have control/influence over if the fictional world were real. And so the difference is made clear - the character ‘should’ have no control/influence over what the runes are, only if they can interpret them and so there would be no expectation that this hope would be realized just because of a successful die roll.

 

[FrogReaver]

Huh? 4e D&D is the most coherent version of the game since Moldvay Basic.

Maybe it’s not a good idea to attack games others like as incoherent or less coherent?

 

[Enrahim]

But whether or not something is important for informing a decision has nothing to do with whether it is part of the world or not. It has everything to do with tailoring to the gameplay of the player. Something which has been consistently seen as unacceptably "gamist" and fundamentally incompatible--indeed, actively antagonistic--to "sim".

Regardless though, this blows a MASSIVE hole in the alleged bright-line, hard-binary distinction claimed by a large number of people in this thread, AIUI including yourself. That is, this exception now allows for crafting an enormous amount of the world both (a) only after rolling, and (b) specifically because of rolling, and in particular, things that explain why failure occurred, but which are prior to the action and indeed part of the world itself, not part of the action.

Your action cannot create crumbly handholds. That kind of separation has been used, repeatedly, by numerous posters in this thread, as the key thing which differentiates "traditional GM" sim-based play from other things: actions not only do not, but cannot result in something in the world being revealed to be true when it was unspecified before. And yet only now, long after this alleged bright-line distinction, this extremely hard binary separation between "X may happen" and "X may not happen", we get exactly the opposite. Now, a player's failed roll can in fact be the thing which causes the GM to narrate that there were crumbly handholds in the otherwise solid wall. It's not the world causing this. It's not conclusions drawn from or extrapolated from the world's established contents. It's specifically a rule, a mechanic, an abstraction telling us that failure has occurred, and then the GM developing some new fact about the world which is the thing that caused the failure to occur.

A fact about the world is only established after the player rolled a failure. Had the player not done so, no such fact would be established.

I was told, many, many, many, MANY times, that such a thing is utterly verboten. Now you are telling me it's not only okay, it's commonplace and most "traditional GM"-preferring, sim-focused players will in fact go with that no problem.

This calls into question the entire alleged distinction between this approach to play and the things to which it was (allegedly) contrasted, like PbtA. Because now facts CAN be established after the fact, in response to a rule-adjudication, which invert the causative order (action occurs -> rule is applied -> failure results -> the in-world cause of the failure is declared, NOT action occurs -> the in-world cause of failure is determined -> rule is applied -> failure results), as was explicitly required by multiple posters, IIRC including yourself.


In the example given, two contrasting things were described. One was claimed to be of a PbtA-like origin (despite coming from someone who doesn't play such games, doesn't like such games, and admittedly knows little about them beyond this), the other was claimed to be the "traditional GM" sim-focused type result.

The first, allegedly PbtA-like result was that the failure reveals that the whole wall was always crumbly to begin with, even though previous fiction had established that it was sturdy. This specific overt unrealism, where a past fact is simply outright negated by a new fact established because of a roll, was claimed to be utterly unacceptable to the "traditional GM"-preferring, sim-focused player. (I will address why this example was deeply flawed in a moment; for now, simply know that it's a jaundiced and mostly false characterization.)

The second, "traditional GM"-style sim-focused result was that the failure reveals that the specific handholds the player used were more crumbly than the rest of the wall, which is otherwise sturdy and climbable, the PC just picked handholds unwisely. Despite this also being a point of unrealism--only establishing the causative agent of failure after the action has completed, thus inverting the causal chain--this has been defined as not merely acceptable, but maybe even desirable.

In other words, the only difference between the two I can see--because both still involve the (previously-claimed-to-be utterly unacceptable) inversion of the causal chain and establishing failure-causing determinations after the action has been completed--is that the first establishes what one might call a "big" fact, while the second establishes what one might call a "small" fact; the first has a fact which contradicts prior established fiction in an extensive way, while the second contradicts prior established fiction only in a narrow way. Hence, it is not contradicting prior established fiction that is the problem; it is not the inversion of the causal direction that is the problem; it is not rules inducing changes to the world that is the problem; because both paths do that. It is only and simply that certain degrees of fact-establishment are "too much", all of which comes down to the arbitrary (and I do mean arbitrary, as in capricious) feelings of the people at the table. The exact same determination, in the same campaign, with the same GM and players, could be a "big" fact in one context and a "small" fact in another simply based on the emotional state of the player, the degree to which they have chosen to inform themselves (e.g. by investigating further, by doing in-world research, by talking to experts or witnesses, etc., etc.), the scene in which the fact is revealed, and the degree to which the players' attention is drawn to the fact vs drawn away from it.

My last answer got carried away into the details, and failed to see the big picture.

I think now that the critical failure here is to miss the distinction between narrative scope and narrative content. Noone disputes that the outcome of a roll can and should affect narrative scope. For one thing, we are likely to narrate the contents of the room behind the door on a successful pick lock check. In trad task resolution not so on a failed check.

More subtle: the result itself creates potential narrative scopes. On a failure on the climb check we can narrate about a climb failure. That we cannot do on a successfull check as that scope plain doesn't exist in the fiction.

This entire thread has had nothing to do about how to establish narrative scope, but has only been about what is aproperiate narrative content given a scope. This content should be independent of success, and this holds true no matter how "big" the narrated element is. (And the sticky part has been philosophical questions around how we can recognise the independence. Not too unlike the question about if the tree falling in the forrest with noone around makes sound)

 

[Enrahim]

Huh? 4e D&D is the most coherent version of the game since Moldvay Basic.

I agree. That is not contradicting my statement.

And while it does have some awkward parts (eg DEX-based barbarians, which outside of Heroic tier will tend to break the AC maths), "fail forward" narration is not one of them.

Ok, I might have missed this. How do 4ed explain why an unskilled person tend to get into more trouble not directly related to their incompetency than someone more skilled? (which I think is a fair description of the use of the term in this tread. If you define it otherwise, that might also explain communication issues)

I don't really feel the force of the "pre-emption". If one of the games that pioneered "fail forward" resolution uses skills to represent a character's abilities, then I think the claim that there is some inherent incompatibility between those two things has not been borne out.

It actually make a lot of sense that the pioneer does it differently than those that came after. After all they need to bridge the gap It could lean fully into the known and familiar innate skill system, while delegating the role of justifying the new and radical stuff to the newly introduced artha system. My impression is that now as BW has pionered the way teaching sufficient people the right mindset, newer games tend to bake this particular function of the artha system into the "skill" system, making for a somewhat leaner game. This is what I tried to describe in my post, as I think that makes it easier to understand the difference in mindset.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think it is about contradiction, but that we now are getting close to find the nature of our comunication trouble I believe a lot of what you have read has been based on unstated assumptions we haven't shared, and that is hard to express.

Well, at least that last bit is definitely one of the frustrations I've had thus far, and one of the reasons I ask for things like specificity and avoiding vagueness.

I think your distinction between "big" and "small" here is the critical fault line. You want to use the same words describing these two phenomena, but for me at least these two phenomena are distinct enough to warrant different language. For instance I have in the past called what you label "big change" "create" while what you call here "small change" for "color". I have in at least two places in this thread so far tried to point out the importance of this distinction. The first was an attempt of explaining based on the granularities involved, compared to the granularity of action resolution. The other is the distinction presented here where it is about relevancy for decission making. I think both formulations are aspects of the same concept that expresses more clearly in different situations. But neither are defining the distinction in a way I feel is sufficiently communicative to bring across the concept.

So I fully apprivpciate your view. The commonality you have found between these two phenomena is (in my view) valid and real. And I fully understand if our communication so far has made any distinction seem arbitrary. I think this is to a large extent because conversation so far has been revolving around the cook example that at least to me so obviously is the "big kind" of change, that it has been natural to think of that as the implied topic.

Alright. I guess I need...a lot more explanation why one thing is "creation" and the other is "color" when, as far as I can tell, both of them are in fact creating things in the world. The climbing example in particular, saying "your handholds were crumbly" has, in every way that I can tell, exactly the same effect on the player: the wall you thought was sturdy was crumbly, and that is what caused you to fail. The one and only difference I can see, which does not to me at all turn "creation" into mere "color", is that one speaks sweepingly of the entire wall without exception, while the other speaks only of the coincidental hand-holds the character just happened to grab. But the essential detail--the wall you thought was sturdy was crumbly--is a new truth generated in both paths, and it is specifically a new truth generated in response to mechanics indicating failure, and retrofitting that explanation onto the world only after the action has been known to have failed. I don't see, for example, how the presence of merely some crumbly hand-holds doesn't rise to the level of affecting decision-making. If the player were informed in advance that there were crumbly hand-holds, surely they would specifically take pains to avoid such a thing, just as they would surely avoid climbing a wall they could see was very crumbly, assuming they have other choices.

And then, for me, the cook is so obviously a "small" change that it's really difficult for me to see how it could be not only a "big" change in your view, but so inherently a big change that you couldn't understand how anyone would see it as a "small" one. At risk of over-analysis, these would be my reasons:

• I expect any human(oid) being to move about. They don't just sit on a single chair nor stand in one spot for hours at a time: they go to the bathroom, they move around the room they work in (even a kitchen!), they gossip, etc.
• I expect a manor-like, "country house" type building, hence why I called it "Château d'Ys", to have an external garden for growing both herbs and food, which a cook may need to visit at all sorts of hours.
• In a house owned by someone either wealthy enough or black-market-connected enough to have a fabulous ruby, I expect a variety of servants, who may change shifts, or have a mix of on-site and off-site dwelling.
• Many medieval-, renaissance-, or post-renaissance heist-type experiences exploit the fact that servant entrances are often a point of weaker security, since they need to accommodate people coming and going at all hours
• Because of the previous, I expect a slight uptick in security, especially if the lord/lady of the manor has a valuable prize; e.g., a lock harder to pick than the front door, since the servants' entrance is out of sight, and folks occasionally checking it

As a result, one might know that a cook is probably around (e.g., Lilia might see lights on inside the house, and thus know there are people to be avoided), without specifically knowing that the cook is in fact coming to the door right this second. Hence, I see a one-to-one correspondence between:
(1) player rolled poorly to climb, so (2) the GM knows that failure-related narration is required, so (3) the GM narrates that the PC climbed an otherwise-sturdy wall, but happened to rely too much on one crumbly bit and thus failed
and
(1) player rolled poorly to pick the lock, so (2) the GM knows that failure-related narration is required, so (3) the GM narrates that the PC found the lock unusually difficult to work with, and thus the extended time spent picking means the cook is (about to) exit the door

Both of these look like the use of, as you say, "color"--things that, at best, were plausible but unstated possible facts--to explain the failure, after the failure has already been rolled. The creation of a small but, in context, essential detail, and in specific a detail which has been added to the world in order to explain the failure. Both things look, to me, like all-but-identical modifications of the world, specifically because the rules told you you needed to modify the world in order to explain why failure occurred.

Now that this distinction however have come to the forefront I feel optimistic we might collectively be able to come up with a delimiter that do not feel fulky arbitrary. But I fear there will have to be a level of subjectivity into it similar to how we earlier in the thread settled on that plausibility is something that is a scale with hard to define cut-offs. There are things that clearly is "big thing" like the cook or the crumbling wall. And there are things I believe is clearly "small things" like the color of the spatula the cook try to hit you with.

Well, as noted, the cook to me doesn't seem like a "big thing". Very briefly summarizing my bullet points above: I expect a cook in Château d'Ys to be mobile for both personal-interest and professional-task reasons, and I expect a servants' entrance to be a prime target but understood as a prime target, creating conditions where house staff are a plausible but (potentially) manageable danger.

But where do the line between these go? I still think granularity compared to what is needed for action resolution is a promising candidate, but as you point out sort of require a gamist frame of mind. I think there migh be some corresponding formulation related to "scope of choice" that might be more generally applicable, but that I fail to fully grasp right now. I hope and would expect others in this thread might have more insights and possibly a better framework in mind that can help resolve this distinction.

I'm certainly willing to hear proposals, though we may need to work out a bit better whether a given thing should be considered one side, the other, or (potentially) intermediate. One primary concern that arises almost immediately is: Will this standard be based on how informed the players are? I don't mean their characters, I mean the players themselves. Consider evaluating where "a moving cook" would be judged to fall. If that depends on (say) whether players know or don't know that it was extremely common for well-to-do estates prior to the 20th century to have lots of external things to use/check, e.g. vegetable garden, herb garden, root cellar, henhouse, etc., then we kind of have a problem again. That means, as before, the exact same circumstance, even for the exact same GM and table, not only can be but must be evaluated differently simply because the players' knowledge, completely independent of the game-world's contents, differs.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ok, I might have missed this. How do 4ed explain why an unskilled person tend to get into more trouble not directly related to their incompetency than someone more skilled? (which I think is a fair description of the use of the term in this tread. If you define it otherwise, that might also explain communication issues)

Well, at least for me, it's because that situation is simply more realistic than the alternative. But if you'd like my reasoning, it is as follows.

Consider the fiction used in pretty much every other edition besides 4e regarding how most spellcasters, but most specifically Wizards, acquire new spells. That is, we are told that the spellcaster acquires these spells through practice, experimentation, training, etc.--but this is functionally never shown. For essentially all groups, this process is 100% completely handwaved; it is presumed to have occurred in all the zillion moments we say nothing about because they weren't particularly interesting. I am not critiquing this practice, to be clear; I am simply noting that we accept this declaration, sight-unseen, simply because we are told it and see nothing which grossly disagrees with it. AIUI, even in 1st Edition (or is it OD&D?), where a Magic-User's spells are by default randomized, this randomization is meant to cover the explicitly asserted but also (almost always) completely unseen experimentation on the MU's part.

Now, consider the life of an adventurer, going from not-quite-green-anymore to transplanar adventures (the usual shape of a 1st-level-to-somewhere-in-Epic game, albeit not the only possible one). Here, two things occur. First, we actually DO see this character forced into situations where they have to do things they aren't very good at. Paladins needing to Stealth. Wizards needing to Intimidate. Clerics needing to lie through their teeth. Etc. Further, we know that these characters interact with one another, share information, and develop a variety of incidental awareness and skill. Unlike the previous, a good portion of this...let's call it "practical experimentation", actually does occur proverbially "on camera". So it is reasonable to assume that a significant portion also occurs "off camera". The small but subtle effect is there, the imprint of weeks, months, years of adventuring.

Characters do not somehow mystically get better. Their whole lives are defined by struggle against danger after danger after danger. They learn a lot of things in those contexts. That learning is often only barely enough to help, just a little, against the newest holy-FECES-what-is-going-on adventure they've gotten sucked into, but if they happen to need to do something in a much more...let's call it "passé" setting, they've learned a thing or two because that context is now old-hat to them. Such learnin' won't make much of a difference when storming the Nevernever Fortress holding the chrysalis of a nascent Primordial/Shadow-Feylord hybrid that means to erase all of existence through corrupting the dreams of mortals, or whatever other adventure that is actually going to interest(/challenge) a party that has reached low Epic tier. But it'll make rather a noticeable difference if that same party needs to sneak into the basement of an otherwise-ordinary merchant who happens to have the key to said fortress but isn't willing to sell.

 

[pemerton]

On the runes, I’m thankful for the example because it’s the clearest example yet of exactly what we claim is happening in narrativist games actually occurring.

It's not an example of "narrativist games". It's an example of MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic.

Apocalypse World is a "narrativist game" - as Vincent Baker says in the acknowledgements, the "entire game design" follows from Edwards's essay "Narrativism: Story Now". But it does not permit action declarations of the sort that I described.

I'm sure many posters in this thread would consider Torchbearer 2e to be a "narrative" or "narrativist" game, but - as per the example of play that I posted in the same post as the example from Cortex+ Heroic, it would not permit the same action declaration: TB2e takes a different approach from MHRP to authority over backstory.

In D&D if a player wants to for example have their PC to climb then they know the rules allow for that specific hope on a successful athletics check. In this sense you are seeing selection bias. Players only hope for outcomes they can realistically achieve, leaving a huge range of potential hopes as ‘invalid’, such that even if they hope for them there is no chance of achieving them and so they simply don’t hope for them.

Yes? It's not "selection bias", it's what counts as permissible action declaration. In the sort of D&D you are describing, I try and read the runes is a permissible action declaration. But adding hoping that they will reveal a way out of the dungeon adds nothing. It is not a component of the action declaration. Whereas in MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic, it is.

There are some versions of D&D which are closer to MHRP/Cortex+. Here's an example from a 4e skill challenge:

The PCs erected a magic circle around the Mausoleum of the Raven Queen, in order to prevent anyone from entering it and potentially learning her true name (backstory here); then rested; then scried on the tarrasque, which they knew to have recently begun marauding in the mortal world, identifying its location and noting that it was being observed by maruts.

<snip>

The player of the eternal defender had already noted that, when I read out the description of maruts and their contracts earlier in the session, the only being actually mentioned by name was the Raven Queen. So he predicted (more-or-less in line with what I had in mind), that the maruts observing the tarrasque would be there at the behest of the Raven Queen (who is served by three of the five PCs), to stop it being interfered with.

When the PCs then took their Tower to confront the tarrasque, that was indeed what they found. Upon arriving at the tarrasque's location they found the tarrasque being warded by a group of maruts who explained that, in accordance with a contract made with the Raven Queen millenia ago, they were there to ensure the realisation of the end times, and to stop anyone interfering with the tarrasque as an engine of this destruction and a herald of the beginning of the end times and the arrival of the Dusk War.

(Why the Raven Queen wants the Dusk War has not fully come to light, other than that it seems part of her plan to realise her own ultimate godhood. One idea I had follows in sblocks.)

[sblock]With Ometh dead, it seems possible that those souls who have passed over the Bridge that May be Traversed But Once might be able to return - repopulating a world remade following the Dusk War and the restoration of the Lattice of Heaven.[/sblock]

I wasn't sure exactly what the players would do here. They could try and fight the maruts, obviously, but I thought the Raven Queen devotees might be hesitant to do so. I had envisaged that the PCs might try to persuade them that the contract was invalid in some way - and this idea was mentioned at the table, together with the related idea of the various exarchs of the Raven Queen in the party trying to lay down the law. In particular I had thought that the paladin of the Raven Queen, who is a Marshall of Letherna (in effect, one of the Raven Queen's most powerful servants), might try to exercise his authority to annual or vary the contract in some fashion.

But instead the argument developed along different lines. What the players did was to persuade the maruts that the time for fulfillment of their contract had not yet arisen, because this visitation of the tarrasque was not yet a sign of the Dusk War. (Mechanically, these were social skill checks, history and religions checks, etc, in a skill challenge to persuade the maruts.)

The player of the Eternal Defender PC made only one action in this skill challenge - explaining that it was not the end times, because he was there to defeat the tarrasque (and got another successful intimidate check, after spending an action point to reroll his initial fail) - before launching himself from the flying tower onto the tarrasque and proceeding to whittle away around 600 of its hit points over two rounds. (There were also two successful out-of-turn attacks from the ranger and the paladin, who were spending their on-turn actions in negotiating with the maruts.)

The invoker/wizard was able to point to this PC's successful solo-ing of the tarrasque as evidence that the tarrasque, at least on this occasion, could not be the harbinger of the end times whom the maruts were contracted to protect, because it clearly lacked the capacity to ravage the world. The maruts agreed with this point - clearly they had misunderstood the timing of celestial events - and the PCs therefore had carte blanche to finish of the tarrasque. (Mechanically, this was the final success in the skill challenge: the player rolled Insight to see what final argument would sway the maruts, knowing that only one success was needed. He succeeded. I invited him to then state the relevant argument.)

I think that the yakuza's contact ability in the original AD&D OA also allows the PC's hope to make a difference. From p 27,

The contacts are not named or defined by the DM or by a table. Instead, when the player wants his character to use a contact, he decides the name and position of the contact and tells the DM. The DM then decides whether the contact is appropriate for the character. The contact cannot be more than four experience levels above the yakuza, and the yakuza character must have had some plausible reason for meeting the contact in the past.​

The answer to the difference ultimately comes back to - the hoped for thing being rolled for must be something the character would have control/influence over if the fictional world were real.

I think there are cases, even in mainstream D&D, that will contradict this principle: for instance, Gygax in his DMG (p 20) says that a thief's ability to read languages

assumes that the language is, in fact, one which the thief has encountered sometime in the past. Ancient and strange
languages (those you, as DM, have previously designated as such) are always totally unreadable.​

So a successful roll to read languages in the now of the game establishes that, in the past of the game, the thief had a certain experience. That doesn't conform to your principle.

I don't make this point as a "gotcha". I make it to illustrate that adhering 100% to the principle that you've stated is extremely demanding. It rules out, for instance, a whole lot of narrations (eg "the wall looked harder than it turned out to be") which might otherwise be part of the narration of a success.

I think that what is shocking to some RPGers is the flagrancy of the runes example, in departing from an assumption of GM authority and centring the player so explicitly.

 

[Enrahim]

Well, at least that last bit is definitely one of the frustrations I've had thus far, and one of the reasons I ask for things like specificity and avoiding vagueness.


Alright. I guess I need...a lot more explanation why one thing is "creation" and the other is "color" when, as far as I can tell, both of them are in fact creating things in the world. The climbing example in particular, saying "your handholds were crumbly" has, in every way that I can tell, exactly the same effect on the player: the wall you thought was sturdy was crumbly, and that is what caused you to fail. The one and only difference I can see, which does not to me at all turn "creation" into mere "color", is that one speaks sweepingly of the entire wall without exception, while the other speaks only of the coincidental hand-holds the character just happened to grab. But the essential detail--the wall you thought was sturdy was crumbly--is a new truth generated in both paths, and it is specifically a new truth generated in response to mechanics indicating failure, and retrofitting that explanation onto the world only after the action has been known to have failed. I don't see, for example, how the presence of merely some crumbly hand-holds doesn't rise to the level of affecting decision-making. If the player were informed in advance that there were crumbly hand-holds, surely they would specifically take pains to avoid such a thing, just as they would surely avoid climbing a wall they could see was very crumbly, assuming they have other choices.

And then, for me, the cook is so obviously a "small" change that it's really difficult for me to see how it could be not only a "big" change in your view, but so inherently a big change that you couldn't understand how anyone would see it as a "small" one. At risk of over-analysis, these would be my reasons:

• I expect any human(oid) being to move about. They don't just sit on a single chair nor stand in one spot for hours at a time: they go to the bathroom, they move around the room they work in (even a kitchen!), they gossip, etc.
• I expect a manor-like, "country house" type building, hence why I called it "Château d'Ys", to have an external garden for growing both herbs and food, which a cook may need to visit at all sorts of hours.
• In a house owned by someone either wealthy enough or black-market-connected enough to have a fabulous ruby, I expect a variety of servants, who may change shifts, or have a mix of on-site and off-site dwelling.
• Many medieval-, renaissance-, or post-renaissance heist-type experiences exploit the fact that servant entrances are often a point of weaker security, since they need to accommodate people coming and going at all hours
• Because of the previous, I expect a slight uptick in security, especially if the lord/lady of the manor has a valuable prize; e.g., a lock harder to pick than the front door, since the servants' entrance is out of sight, and folks occasionally checking it

As a result, one might know that a cook is probably around (e.g., Lilia might see lights on inside the house, and thus know there are people to be avoided), without specifically knowing that the cook is in fact coming to the door right this second. Hence, I see a one-to-one correspondence between:
(1) player rolled poorly to climb, so (2) the GM knows that failure-related narration is required, so (3) the GM narrates that the PC climbed an otherwise-sturdy wall, but happened to rely too much on one crumbly bit and thus failed
and
(1) player rolled poorly to pick the lock, so (2) the GM knows that failure-related narration is required, so (3) the GM narrates that the PC found the lock unusually difficult to work with, and thus the extended time spent picking means the cook is (about to) exit the door

Both of these look like the use of, as you say, "color"--things that, at best, were plausible but unstated possible facts--to explain the failure, after the failure has already been rolled. The creation of a small but, in context, essential detail, and in specific a detail which has been added to the world in order to explain the failure. Both things look, to me, like all-but-identical modifications of the world, specifically because the rules told you you needed to modify the world in order to explain why failure occurred.


Well, as noted, the cook to me doesn't seem like a "big thing". Very briefly summarizing my bullet points above: I expect a cook in Château d'Ys to be mobile for both personal-interest and professional-task reasons, and I expect a servants' entrance to be a prime target but understood as a prime target, creating conditions where house staff are a plausible but (potentially) manageable danger.


I'm certainly willing to hear proposals, though we may need to work out a bit better whether a given thing should be considered one side, the other, or (potentially) intermediate. One primary concern that arises almost immediately is: Will this standard be based on how informed the players are? I don't mean their characters, I mean the players themselves. Consider evaluating where "a moving cook" would be judged to fall. If that depends on (say) whether players know or don't know that it was extremely common for well-to-do estates prior to the 20th century to have lots of external things to use/check, e.g. vegetable garden, herb garden, root cellar, henhouse, etc., then we kind of have a problem again. That means, as before, the exact same circumstance, even for the exact same GM and table, not only can be but must be evaluated differently simply because the players' knowledge, completely independent of the game-world's contents, differs.

I answered more precisely in a different post. But for your extensive example here the analysis might be very simple, but I think can show a profound difference in language and mentality: Is the cook coming out a failure or a fail forward? Things that is completely natural to describe as a failure result is in my understanding simply describing a failure. In the scenario you describe a cook coming out seem to me like a perfectly natural description of failing to pick the lock quickly.

Employing fail forward as a technique implies more than just "describe any natural failure state". It instructs you to have a certain mindset regarding how you describe failures. You can't look at a game where a failure be described in a way that happened to drive the story forward, and claim that this is "fail forward" in action. At least not in my understanding of the term. It requires the GM to deliberately try to come up with something interesting, despite "nothing happens" might be the otherwise most natural outcome.

So in your example, did you introduce the cook because you genuinely thought it was the most natural thing to happen, or did the fact that it is dramatic factor in? This is of course hard to recognise in oneself in the heat of it, and this is a reason to warn against using it mindlessly. Once this has become an automatic part of your GM-ing strategy it can become really hard to avoid the biases it can create.

EDIT: The above is also secondary to the principle of independent narrative content detailed in my other post, but I think this perspective suplement it nicely in terms of mindset - and might be more obvious in how to apply practically.

 

[Enrahim]

Well, at least for me, it's because that situation is simply more realistic than the alternative. But if you'd like my reasoning, it is as follows.

Consider the fiction used in pretty much every other edition besides 4e regarding how most spellcasters, but most specifically Wizards, acquire new spells. That is, we are told that the spellcaster acquires these spells through practice, experimentation, training, etc.--but this is functionally never shown. For essentially all groups, this process is 100% completely handwaved; it is presumed to have occurred in all the zillion moments we say nothing about because they weren't particularly interesting. I am not critiquing this practice, to be clear; I am simply noting that we accept this declaration, sight-unseen, simply because we are told it and see nothing which grossly disagrees with it. AIUI, even in 1st Edition (or is it OD&D?), where a Magic-User's spells are by default randomized, this randomization is meant to cover the explicitly asserted but also (almost always) completely unseen experimentation on the MU's part.

Now, consider the life of an adventurer, going from not-quite-green-anymore to transplanar adventures (the usual shape of a 1st-level-to-somewhere-in-Epic game, albeit not the only possible one). Here, two things occur. First, we actually DO see this character forced into situations where they have to do things they aren't very good at. Paladins needing to Stealth. Wizards needing to Intimidate. Clerics needing to lie through their teeth. Etc. Further, we know that these characters interact with one another, share information, and develop a variety of incidental awareness and skill. Unlike the previous, a good portion of this...let's call it "practical experimentation", actually does occur proverbially "on camera". So it is reasonable to assume that a significant portion also occurs "off camera". The small but subtle effect is there, the imprint of weeks, months, years of adventuring.

Characters do not somehow mystically get better. Their whole lives are defined by struggle against danger after danger after danger. They learn a lot of things in those contexts. That learning is often only barely enough to help, just a little, against the newest holy-FECES-what-is-going-on adventure they've gotten sucked into, but if they happen to need to do something in a much more...let's call it "passé" setting, they've learned a thing or two because that context is now old-hat to them. Such learnin' won't make much of a difference when storming the Nevernever Fortress holding the chrysalis of a nascent Primordial/Shadow-Feylord hybrid that means to erase all of existence through corrupting the dreams of mortals, or whatever other adventure that is actually going to interest(/challenge) a party that has reached low Epic tier. But it'll make rather a noticeable difference if that same party needs to sneak into the basement of an otherwise-ordinary merchant who happens to have the key to said fortress but isn't willing to sell.

I am sorry, I do not see how this connects to my question? It seem like you try to explain why characters advance?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I answered more precisely in a different post. But for your extensive example here the analysis is very simple but I think shows a profound difference in language and mentality: Is the cook coming out a failure or a fail forward? Things that is completely natural to describe as a failure result is in my understanding simply describing a failure. In the scenario you describe a cook coming out seem to me like a perfectly natural description of failing to pick the lock quickly.

Employing fail forward as a technique implies more than just "describe any natural failure state". It instructs you to have a certain mindset regarding how you describe failures. You can't look at a game where a failure be described in a way that happened to drive the story forward, and claim that this is "fail forward" in action. At least not in my understanding of the term. It requires the GM to deliberately try to come up with something interesting, despite "nothing happens" might be the otherwise most natural outcome.

So in your example, did you introduce the cook because you genuinely thought it was the most natural thing to happen, or did the fact that it is dramatic factor in?

The only possible answer is "yes". It is both things simultaneously, by construction--albeit not "dramatic" as that implies "I am a director pushing along a scripted structure", which could not be less the case. Instead, it is both born from what is most reasonable in context and what is conflict-furthering. That is, a move should not be invoked if furthering the conflict in some direction is not part of it. If there's genuinely no chance you could get caught, or pay a cost, or whatever when picking the lock? Then the lock just gets picked, probably with some narration about it taking a while but otherwise being uneventful.

This is simply a further elaboration of a principle that, as far as I can tell, nearly everyone here practices: if failure or success is guaranteed, you don't make a roll that is about distinguishing failure from success. (Note that, contra some of the questions above, I don't consider any of the foregoing examples folks have made of "degree of success(/failure) when success(/failure) is guaranteed" to actually meet that description. Instead, they are establishing that a success or failure is already locked in, and in that context, the conflict becomes "can you make the unavoidable as favorable as possible?", which is a new and distinct failure or success building upon the unavoidable.) The elaboration, then, is that when failure is merely a matter of determining amount of delay time, or waiting until someone rolls high enough to guess the door password, or whatever other "genuinely NOTHING happens" things....then why invoke the rules at all? We can talk through "genuinely NOTHING happens" without needing to bother with the rigamarole of invoking the rules.

This is of course hard to recognise in oneself in the heat of it, and this is a reason to warn against using it mindlessly. Once this has become an automatic part of your GM-ing strategy it can become really hard to avoid the biases it can create.

I don't understand how it creates any biases whatsoever, so...I'm afraid I cannot meaningfully respond to this.

EDIT: The above is also secondary to the principle of independent narrative content detailed in my other post but I think this perspective suplement it nicely in terms of mindset.

Okay? I still don't really understand that principle either.

I am sorry, I do not see how this connects to my question? It seem like you try to explain why characters advance?

Er...no? I'm explaining why characters pick up little bits and bobs of all sorts of skills, without going to the overt effort of Becoming Formally Trained. Character advancement in general is unrelated. This is solely about the causative factor which leads to characters becoming ever-so-slightly more skilled with a dozen odds-and-ends (the generic half-level bonus), because people who live a life that challenges them naturally grow in a zillion useful but hard-to-quantify ways.

E.g., I've learned to cook, learned the basics of wiring an HVAC system, learned to repair small vehicle issues, helped dress an elk to be butchered, gardened, cared for animals, repaired a toilet (...several times...), and probably a dozen other one-off mini-skills, all while living a very ordinary life. If I were constantly on the road, adventuring, put in peril, faced with all sorts of strange and difficult situations, the list of extremely random little incidents that would occur and shape what I know, what I can do, what I've been exposed to, would be a kilometer long! That thing, that pile-of-incidental-understanding, is the root cause of the half-level bonus applying to skills.

People are not static entities which gain absolutely nothing unless they go through a rigid, structured education course. People are sponges that soak up every experience they're exposed to. Some of those things, we get to see actually played out, characters who don't know how to lie to save their butts, but they have to try, and all sorts of similar things. Some of it, we don't see, because we don't keep a laser-tight focus on every single waking moment of every single day.

Those bits-and-bobs, the incidental learning that necessarily happens as the result of being a successful adventurer who has survived many, many, many trials and tribulations, are the half-level bonus.

It is, frankly, extremely unrealistic and hard to grok that a character should go from level 1 to level 20 (or 30 or whatever) and develop absolutely NOTHING of an understanding of how to make a little less noise when trying to be sneaky.