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

[thefutilist]

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.

You probably picked up using the word color from conversations around GNS, which does have different categorisations for this stuff because it is extremely important for looking at how systems are different.

To give a really clear example, there's a game called 'The pool'. When you win a roll you can spend a pool point to narrate what happens on success. What type of stuff can you narrate though? Does it make a difference?

If the player is fighting 'the masked man' and the player wants to knock him to the floor. We roll the dice and the player wins. They spend a pool point and narrate, what's legitimate?


Player: I knock him to the ground and his mask comes off. (GM then reveals who it is)

Player: I knock him to the ground his mask comes off, revealing my father (Player chooses who it is)


I don't think the above two things are the same at all.

So we need language for the type of stuff made up and the type of changes that can occur. GNS has that but in practice it's hard to make comparisons purely on the resolution level because so many other systems are interacting with each other.

 

[Enrahim]

You probably picked up using the word color from conversations around GNS, which does have different categorisations for this stuff because it is extremely important for looking at how systems are different.

To give a really clear example, there's a game called 'The pool'. When you win a roll you can spend a pool point to narrate what happens on success. What type of stuff can you narrate though? Does it make a difference?

If the player is fighting 'the masked man' and the player wants to knock him to the floor. We roll the dice and the player wins. They spend a pool point and narrate, what's legitimate?


Player: I knock him to the ground and his mask comes off. (GM then reveals who it is)

Player: I knock him to the ground his mask comes off, revealing my father (Player chooses who it is)


I don't think the above two things are the same at all.

So we need language for the type of stuff made up and the type of changes that can occur. GNS has that but in practice it's hard to make comparisons purely on the resolution level because so many other systems are interacting with each other.

I am aware color is a component in big model. I don't intend to invoce that beast here. Rather think of my use of it like how my young daughters are first drawing the outline of their artwork before putting on color.

 

[thefutilist]

I am aware color is a component in big model. I don't intend to invoce that beast here. Rather think of my use of it like how my young daughters are first drawing the outline of their artwork before putting on color.

Yeah I just found it amusing that you independently created a very similar demarcation.

In GNS speak: Crumbly rocks is color, the nature of the writing in @pemertons example is actually color as well until the resolution system kicks in and then it gains situational positioning.

I'm also not saying that one should use GNS to analyse what's going on, it's more that the whole thing is a live problem as it were.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Player: I knock him to the ground his mask comes off, revealing my father (Player chooses who it is)

Don't knock it, it worked for Luke.

 

[Gimby]

You probably picked up using the word color from conversations around GNS, which does have different categorisations for this stuff because it is extremely important for looking at how systems are different.

To give a really clear example, there's a game called 'The pool'. When you win a roll you can spend a pool point to narrate what happens on success. What type of stuff can you narrate though? Does it make a difference?

If the player is fighting 'the masked man' and the player wants to knock him to the floor. We roll the dice and the player wins. They spend a pool point and narrate, what's legitimate?


Player: I knock him to the ground and his mask comes off. (GM then reveals who it is)

Player: I knock him to the ground his mask comes off, revealing my father (Player chooses who it is)


I don't think the above two things are the same at all.

So we need language for the type of stuff made up and the type of changes that can occur. GNS has that but in practice it's hard to make comparisons purely on the resolution level because so many other systems are interacting with each other.

Agreed, though it's fairly trivial to conceive of a situation whereby the knocking off of the mask is the salient thing (perhaps it is valuable, or magical, perhaps it is the source of the difficulty in the scenario) whereas the identity of the wearer isn't (our party of right thinking murderhobos aren't going care that it's anyone's father, or less harshly the value of freeing someone from the influence of the Malign Mask is not hugely dependant on their identity for a particularly righteous paladin)

We then kind of come back to the idea of subjective salience of the details making it hard to formally separate the two

 

[thefutilist]

Agreed, though it's fairly trivial to conceive of a situation whereby the knocking off of the mask is the salient thing (perhaps it is valuable, or magical, perhaps it is the source of the difficulty in the scenario) whereas the identity of the wearer isn't (our party of right thinking murderhobos aren't going care that it's anyone's father, or less harshly the value of freeing someone from the influence of the Malign Mask is not hugely dependant on their identity for a particularly righteous paladin)

We then kind of come back to the idea of subjective salience of the details making it hard to formally separate the two

Oh yeah 100% agree.

 

[Campbell]

I think the point here is that the GM has to agree with the stakes first - it's not that the roll is made and then on a success the player has free rein to say what the runes are, it's that the players and GM before agree that the request is reasonable (so authorship is shared) so on a success the table gets the shared authorship result, on a failure they get what the GM authors alone.

This is correct. Basically:
1. Player says what their character does and what they are trying to achieve.
2. GM either says that task/intention combo is not credible (which requires the player to revise task and intent or provides the Ob (Difficulty number) at which point the player can revise or roll the dice.

 

[AlViking]

And I have seen it very specifically change from information that is not yet determined to rolls that are not (sufficiently) related to the information. That is a massive and completely unjustified change, and I'm not going to say anything further about it to you, regardless of what reply I might get to this post.

Have you ever climbed a cliff? Looked up and said "That doesn't look too hard" only to find out that it's not as easy as it looks? Because I have. There are times when almost all of the handholds you grab are rock solid and then you grab that one rock that gives way. Describing such a scenario is not changing anything, it's explaining why even someone proficient in rock climbing can get unlucky and grab that one rock that breaks free. It's also why sometimes you can safely climb one cliff that is far steeper than another because that first cliff is made of a type of stone more likely to be completely stable.

Real world cliffs are not like commercial climbing walls, sometimes the stone gives way. If you're lucky and experienced at climbing it doesn't cause you to fall, but there are no guarantees.

 

[AlViking]

I think the point here is that the GM has to agree with the stakes first - it's not that the roll is made and then on a success the player has free rein to say what the runes are, it's that the players and GM before agree that the request is reasonable (so authorship is shared) so on a success the table gets the shared authorship result, on a failure they get what the GM authors alone.

Which is fine, obviously in the rune example the player can't decide that the runes make them into a god although I do wonder how the GM would respond to that*. What they hope for has to be reasonable and fit the context of the game. But @pemerton said that's not true - which is why it feels like they're just disagreeing to disagree.

Finding the way out of the dungeon in the rune example seemed perfectly reasonable wish to me, but it was still the player that authored the result that came true because they succeeded on their check. So if I'm missing something, what is it?

*Something other than "The player wouldn't do that" please. Assume it's a new player or just who occasionally asks for things just to see what the GM would say and how far they can push it.

EDIT - I was half asleep when I wrote this, is it really just that if the request is unreasonable the GM just says "No, this is what it is?" Is there back and forth, negotiation?

 

[FrogReaver]

Agreed, though it's fairly trivial to conceive of a situation whereby the knocking off of the mask is the salient thing (perhaps it is valuable, or magical, perhaps it is the source of the difficulty in the scenario) whereas the identity of the wearer isn't (our party of right thinking murderhobos aren't going care that it's anyone's father, or less harshly the value of freeing someone from the influence of the Malign Mask is not hugely dependant on their identity for a particularly righteous paladin)

We then kind of come back to the idea of subjective salience of the details making it hard to formally separate the two

From my perspective I cannot think of a single example that would render who was in the mask as mere color. Certainly none of your suggestions come close to that for me. And even more so as to why they were in it, if it is cursed or worn purposeful is also even further beyond mere color from my perspective.