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

What do you mean by "author stance"? The only definition I'm familiar with comes from here, and you're obviously not using that one.
Fair, it is more 'director stance' according to that definition. I think that expresses the same point though--Doyle is author and director, while Watson is just actor. By choosing the stakes you have left actor stance, and doing so harms immersion.

Thinking more about this:
I will perhaps get to some other comments tomorrow. But I've got time for just one or two. I want to look at the lottery comparison.

There is a crucial difference between the lottery and the rune case. If I buy a lottery ticket and say "gosh I hope I win the lottery", I am not affecting my odds of winning. Likewise, the nature of the prize (money) is determined beforehand. If I say, "gosh I hope my lost love returns to me", that cannot change the prize. (shades of this)

In the rune case, if the player says "I hope the runes show the way to a lost treasure" or "I hope the runes give me a powerful spell" or whatever, they do change the odds. If I need a 10+ and have a 0, they give me a 1-in-6 chance of getting whatever it is I want (subject to DM approval via the credibility criterion).

So the analogy to the lottery fails.

And I need to address this also...

Surely the orc would not have died if Coriander (and friends) had not attacked? Surely if the players focus fire on a target, they could say "we decided the caster dies first"?

This entire conversation seems to me semantic quibbling about how 'decide' is used.

If you want to die on that hill, fine...we don't need to use decide. It's clear that the player has a chance to author fiction about the world which is unrelated to their character via declaration of their characters hopes.
I think we can draw a distinction between "deciding the stakes" and "deciding the outcome". Saying "I kill the orc" is deciding the outcome. Saying "I attack the orc" (or "I hope the runes are this") is deciding the stakes.

The lottery comparison fails because the player doesn't decide the stakes or the outcome, while in the rune case they decide the stakes (subject to the credibility criterion).
 

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I can think of a rather ridiculous number of cliffs and banks that I tried and failed to climb as a kid (and a much lower number where I succeeded!). I rarely fell, but always ended up back at the bottom more or less where I started; usually because I'd either bitten off more than I could chew or (far more likely) just didn't know what I was doing.

And to me, that's failure: you don't get to the top (or safely to the bottom, if you're trying to climb down). And in the game, where you're supposedly rolling to determine the binary states of success or failure, success is defined as reaching the top and failure is anything else.

But that describes a very small number of climbs; the vast majority can be managed by most people if they can be managed at all, given enough time. They might get exhausted before they finish, but that's again an issue largely of time taken. Most climbs people can't do at all they could probably tell they couldn't do from the get go (and in the majority of cases, probably neither could anyone else without special equipment).

I'm afraid "failed to climb it in the time desired" still seems like legit failure to me because its what failure is going to mean in most of those cases. Same with lockpicking. The cases where you are going to fail out irrecoverably seem like cases where there shouldn't even have been a roll at all.
 

What does this mean in layman's terms? That those games don't have spellcaster characters as such, or that they do but the player has no control over what gets cast when, or ???
A magical ability is a die-rated ability like any other.

The dice, however, do not decide what Coriander-Brenda wants the runes to say. ]Brenda decides that
Correct. That's part of the action declaration.

the dice then determine whether her decision comes out true or false in the fiction.
Correct. (If you want to be precise, the dice yield an outcome which all the participants have agreed they will treat as binding.) That is not Brenda deciding. Which was my point.

In the rune case, if the player says "I hope the runes show the way to a lost treasure" or "I hope the runes give me a powerful spell" or whatever, they do change the odds. If I need a 10+ and have a 0, they give me a 1-in-6 chance of getting whatever it is I want (subject to DM approval via the credibility criterion).

So the analogy to the lottery fails.
I don't know how having a 1-in-6 chance is meant to be different from a lottery.

But in any event, you are missing the point of the comparison to the lottery (and to D&D combat): which is that no one describes those outcomes as having been decided.

Instead of a lottery, I could equally have referred to a hand of poker. Skill affects a person's chance of winning at poker: but no one describes someone who wins at poker as having decided to win. (Outside perhaps of totally mis-matched contests, where the expert either toys with their opponent or decides to win.)

Surely the orc would not have died if Coriander (and friends) had not attacked? Surely if the players focus fire on a target, they could say "we decided the caster dies first"?
They can decide to attack the caster first. They can decide that the caster will be the first to die (if anyone does).

But they don't decide that the caster is dead. Combat in D&D requires dice rolls to resolve it; typically, so does skill use. That's why there are so many threads contrasting what "martial" PCs can do compared to the fiat abilities that magic-users have. Obviously there are a range of opinions as to what, if anything, should be made of the difference: but I don't think I've ever seen anyone say that fighters (with their attacks) and rogues (with their skills) can just decide things in the way that a magic-user with their spells can.

It's a crucial feature of MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic that nearly every action requires an opposed dice roll. (The exception is the ability, under certain circumstances, to spend a point to create a resource.) This means that there is always an opposed pool - if there is no active opposition, it is the Doom Pool. The "owner" of that opposed pool has various options, if they win the roll (and sometimes even if they lose) to create effects that redound upon the acting character.

This is how MHRP achieves the same sort of momentum as "fail forward" in Burning Wheel, or the GM's obligation to make a move in Apocalypse World. And in this particular case, it's what invests the attempt to read the runes with a degree of weight at the table, as something more than just a dice-rolling exercise.

It's clear that the player has a chance to author fiction about the world which is unrelated to their character
Is it unrelated, though?

From here, as an example of "Simulationism over-riding Narrativism":

A weapon does precisely the same damage range regardless of the emotional relationship between wielder and target. (True for RuneQuest, not true for Hero Wars)​

When playing Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic - a RPG that was designed, after all, to evoke the mood and feel of super-hero comics - emotional relationships, aspirations for things, etc are relationships that matter as much as causal relationships.

As I posted not too far upthread, in reply to @thefutilist, MHRP uses a system of Scene Distinctions. The strange runes were one such. So the framing of the scene invites the players to invest in what these runes might be. In the context of just having been teleported who-knows-where-in-the-dungeon by a Crypt Thing. What is salient, at that moment of play, is the fact that the PCs are Lost in the Dungeon (each has a d12 complication with this label). The strange runes are an element of the scene, called out as such by way of a Scene Distinction; but what they say is not itself inherently at stake. If the players had chosen to ignore them, then that would have been that unless I, as GM, had taken it upon myself to "activate" them in some fashion (using the Doom Pool in an appropriate way).

When a player choose to make the strange runes a focus of play, they establish a connection - of interest of possibility - that matters to the resolution. To describe it as unrelated is to assume what is false, namely, that resolution is governed by a certain sort of "simulationist" priority.
 

....

It literally actually does though.

7-9 is a partial success. This may work out as: you get some of what you wanted, but must sacrifice something else (e.g. you can only choose one benefit out of four, rather than three benefits out of four); you get what you wanted, and also what you didn't want (e.g. you deal your damage, but you also take damage);

6- is explicitly called a "miss" or a "fail". You don't get what you want--and because rolls are only supposed to occur when both failure and success are interesting, otherwise we stay where we started, meaning, "in the fiction"--and something bad happens.

"You just fail and literally nothing happens or changes" isn't the result of a roll in DW because "literally nothing happens, the world doesn't change, nothing of value was gained nor lost, just keep rolling until something changes" isn't what rolls are for in that game. "LITERALLY only failure on the task, but NOTHING whatsoever comes of that failure" isn't an option, yes. But results that are failures do, in fact, happen. "Failure" as the result of a roll needs to be more than just "literally only failure on the task but nothing whatsoever actually happens".

Yeah, I've made the argument that the problem for most of the people I play with is they'd view the traditional PbtA roll as consisting of "success, failure with a cookie, and fumbles" and the basic die roll leans into the latter two.
 

We do see it. Every time the wizard casts a spell in or out of combat, including times where he tries to get creative with the use of one of his spells, that's practice, experimentation and training, etc.

In the fiction at level up it's something like, "Hmm. You know, if I take the ranged component from the here Magic Missile spell and the explosive firey portion of the Burning Hands spell, and then bridge them together with McFearson's bridging language that Master Splinter taught me as an apprentice, I can throw fire farther away. Holy cow! Bridging those two together compresses the fire into a form as small as a pea and then it explodes into a great Fireball at the point of my choosing.

What we hear at the table is, "Hey DM. I'm picking Fireball as one of my two spells for making 5th level."

Like many abstractions, we don't need to be shown how something happens. We just know it happens. The rules cannot show how everything works, no game can.
 

I don't know how having a 1-in-6 chance is meant to be different from a lottery.
It isn't about the odds. It's about the stakes.
But in any event, you are missing the point of the comparison to the lottery (and to D&D combat): which is that no one describes those outcomes as having been decided.

Instead of a lottery, I could equally have referred to a hand of poker. Skill affects a person's chance of winning at poker: but no one describes someone who wins at poker as having decided to win. (Outside perhaps of totally mis-matched contests, where the expert either toys with their opponent or decides to win.)
You don't decide to win at poker. You do decide what to play for--a new car, $25,000, the opportunity to make your buddy wear a silly hat.

And you decide to play for the runes being a map.
Is it unrelated, though?
Yes. The PC did not create the runes and has no control over what they look like.
When a player choose to make the strange runes a focus of play, they establish a connection - of interest of possibility - that matters to the resolution. To describe it as unrelated is to assume what is false, namely, that resolution is governed by a certain sort of "simulationist" priority.
And again...the player decides (sorry, chooses) what the stakes are.
 

Upthread, @thefutilist posted this example - or pair of contrasting examples:
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.
The example gets its force in part by resting on an assumption that it matters who the masked man is. (As @Gimby pointed out.) When it is this identity that is at stake, then it makes a big difference where the authority to establish that bit of fiction is located.
Eero Tuovinen has also discussed the same example and has made a related point:

These games are tremendously fun, and they form a very discrete family of games wherein many techniques are interchangeable between the games. The most important common trait these games share is the GM authority over backstory and dramatic coordination . . . which powers the GM uses to put the player characters into pertinent choice situations. Can you see how this underlying fundamental structure is undermined by undiscretionary use of narrative sharing? The fun in these games from the player’s viewpoint comes from the fact that he can create an amazing story with nothing but choices made in playing his character; this is the holy grail of rpg design, this is exactly the thing that was promised to me in 1992 in the MERP rulebook. And it works, but only as long as you do not require the player to take part in determining the backstory and moments of choice. If the player character is engaged in a deadly duel with the evil villain of the story, you do not ask the player to determine whether it would be “cool” if the villain were revealed to be the player character’s father. The correct heuristic is to throw out the claim of fatherhood if it seems like a challenging revelation for the character, not ask the player whether he’s OK with it – asking him is the same as telling him to stop considering the scene in terms of what his character wants and requiring him to take an objective stance on what is “best for the story”. Consensus is a poor tool in driving excitement, a roleplaying game does not have teeth if you stop to ask the other players if it’s OK to actually challenge their characters.​

Here are two examples from my own play - one BW, one TB2e - where these sorts of challenges around relatives have been introduced by me as GM:
To give an actual play example, again from BW:

* The mage PC has three relevant goals: to align with the other PCs so as to free his brother from Balrog possession, and also to recover a nickel-silver mace from the ruins of his former tower;

* The sorcerer/assassin/ranger PC has a goal to flay her former master and send his soul to Hell, in revenge for what he did to her - her former master happens to be the brother;

* The elven ronin PC has a goal to confront evil whether it resides in the hearts of orcs or humanity, and (as part of his backstory) wears a broken black arrow about his neck, the cursed arrow that slew his (former) master and mentor.​

The PCs arrive at the ruined tower in the Abor-Alz which, some 14 years ago, was the home of the PC mage and his brother, and which they abandoned when it was attacked by orcs and his brother became possessed by the Balrog when an attempt to cast a might combat spell failed. (This was backstory already established by the player of the mage, more-or-less from the beginning of the campaign.)

As already noted, the player of the mage wants to find the mace that he once forged but never successfully enchanted (further backstory established by the player a session or so beforehand, when he decided that a mace would be a good melee weapon for his PC.) So the PC encourages the elven ronin to search through the tower looking for the mace (the ronin being the only PC with Scavenging skill, which is the relevant skill in BW for this sort of thing).

The check is made, and fails. So I tell the players that the ronin searches through the ruins of the tower, but the only interesting thing that he finds is a stand of black arrows sitting in the ruins of what was, 14 years ago, the brother's workroom to which the PC mage was never admitted. When the PC mage uses Aura Reading to ascertain the nature of the arrows, I don't ask for a roll but simply tell him: the arrows are cursed with a penalty to recovery rolls from the injuries they cause which (for various system mechanical reasons) will be particularly harsh on elves.

The mace, of course, can't be found. Someone else must have already taken it. (In the next session it turned out that it had been taken by the dark elf who was trying to thwart the PCs.)

In narrating that failure for the Scavenging check, I achieve several things: I generated a very strong implication that the brother was evil before being possessed by the Balrog; I established a clear connection between the elven ronin's backstory and the backstory of the other two PCs; and I made it hard if not impossible for the mage PC to ally with the other PCs to save his brother. (In a subsequent session, there was in fact a Duel of Wits between the mage PC on one side and the sorcerer-assassin and elf PCs on the other side, in which the mage was persuaded to ally with them in tracking down his brother, but so that he could be killed - because he was clearly irredeemably evil.)
Lareth then turned his attention to Fea-bella. The conversation established that Lareth's father was the wizard Pallando, and his mother (Fella) was an exile from Elfhome. She was exiled because of her role in the theft of the Dreamhouse post by Celedhring, the evil Elf who is now a barrow-wight beneath what was Megloss's house. Lareth explained that Celedhring was Fella's brother (and hence his and Fea-bella's uncle), and that Fella was exiled with him much as, in the ancient times, Galadriel was exiled with her cousin Feanor. "And who is your father?" asked Lareth of Fea-bella.

This caused much discussion among the players - was Lareth implying that Fea-bella was the child of an incestuous relationship between Fella and Celedhring? There was also discussion about where Fea-bella did her dreaming, before she woke, Dream-haunted, and ran off bearing a half-moon glaive. Was this not in the Elf-home Dreamhouse, but rather in Pallando's house?

I suggested that Fea-bella might try a Nature (Remembering) test, but her player didn't want to - too much grind, and little chance of success. So I resorted to my NPC, and called for another Manipulator vs Manipulator due to Lareth's goading. This time Golin helped Lareth! The test was failed, and so (as a twist) Fea-bella could not help but cast her mind back . . . As her player put it, Fea-bella wanted to remember only happy times of her childhood, with the Elven forest and rainbows and unicorns, and I set this at (I think, from memory) Ob 2. Telemere helped with his own Remembering Nature, and Korvin used Oratory to remind Fea-bella of tales of her childhood she had told her companions. Golin also aided Fea-bella this time, with Dreams-wise.

This test was a success, and so Fea-bella was spared any horrible memories (and the truth about her father remains unknown at this point).
Hopefully these posts make it clear enough how I, as a GM, am using my authority over consequences (of failed checks), framing (including what NPCs know and say), and backstory (as a component of both of the preceding) to "throw out the claim" that Jobe's brother is evil, or that Fea-bella's nightmares may be the result of her being the daughter of an incestuous union, and her father now being a barrow-wight whose tomb reads "In communion with the Outer Dark".

Each "move" of that sort by the GM narrows the fictional "space" a bit: once the black arrows are found in Joachim's workroom, it becomes hard to suppose that he was pure of heart until possessed by a Balrog; rather, the fact that he was making the arrows suggests it was the opposite - ie his villainy invited a Balrog to possess him. This then creates the foundation for the subsequent Duel of Wits.

It is inherent in Fea-bella's character class (Elven Dreamwalker) that she is haunted by nightmares. Once it is established that Celedrhing is her uncle, and that he and Fella were banished together, and that Fella is also the mother of "the dark hope of Chaotic Evil", Lareth the Beautiful (a Half-Elf in this particular game), then it becomes hard to suppose that Fea-bella's parentage was nevertheless unremarkable and wholesome.

I think that the exercise of judgement in relation to these themes or elements in a game is one of the more demanding aspects of GMing. Go to soft, and the weight is dissipated and the upshot is anti-climax. Go to hard, and it is just a hosing of the player by way of GM fiat. Each bit of narration, in my view, has to be carefully responsive to exactly what the player has put at stake by dint of their PC build and their play of their PC so far.

I think this is quite different from the Strange Runes, which are - at least initially - a potentially interesting feature of the dungeon, but nothing more than that.
 

They way it seems to me, is if it's not really a valid move to deny the players idea if he makes successful roll, what the roll does is determine who is authoring the runes. If the roll is successful, the runes say what the player wanted them to say. The DM doesn't really author the runes unless the roll fails.

No, but as @Gimby has explained, it's collaborative. This is all agreed upon and then the roll is made to see how it goes.

If the player instead takes another action, one that is not about determining the nature of the runes, it may make sense for the GM to make a determination about them.

This certainly ties into was seems to happen in Apocalypse World, at least as narrated by my friend. I think what happens is all the players try to outdo each other with the silliest development they can think of.

Ah, yes... your "friend" made that observation about Apocalypse World! That's a totally true anecdote and not just you making an unfounded claim about a game you don't understand!
 

You know. I’m not sure what you are talking about either.
In the course of looking for an account of some Burning Wheel play from 10 years ago, I found this post of mine, which discusses the causation issue:
The language of "causation" is mistaken, though. The attempt by the elven ronin in my BW game to find the mace in the tower didn't cause the mace, or the black arrows, to be there or not there. Rather, the mechanical action declaration - an event at the table - caused me, as GM, to establish one or the other as true within the fiction.

You might say that finding the black arrows would have been interesting whether or not the PCs found the mace. True. But part of the point of an RPG is that the players and GM share authority in determining what is true in the fiction. The player of the mage, who was the one who actually set up the Scavenging check (even though it was attempted by another PC), did not want to find black arrows, and thereby learn (in character) that his brother was doing wicked things prior to being possessed by a Balrog. And if the check had been successful. then as GM the rules of the game oblige me to respect the player's desire.

The point of failure, in a "fail forward" game, is to shift authority to the GM rather than the player to introduce interesting stuff, which thereby allows the GM to introduce stuff that thwards rather than conforms with the players' desires for their PCs.

So, just as I narrated black arrows in lieu of a mace on a failed Scavenging check, I could imagine that there might be a situation where it is appropriate to narrate opening the door into a rainstorm for a failed Lockpicking check.

My response to this is the same as for the rain example: you are assuming a type of correlation between the resolution of the action declaration at the table, and the causal processes that unfold in the gameworld, which does not hold in a game being played "fail forward"-style.
The same post had this, too, which I think is pretty consistent with what I've posted over the subsequent decade, including in this thread:
Most of Burning Wheel's GMing advice - for action resolution, for scene-framing, for backstory and campaign design - is aimed at this. It interacts with a PC build system that requires players to provide clear signals about goals for their PCs.

"Fail forward" is a fairly important element in this, because it is the narration of failure by the GM that introduces the additional content into the fictional situation that establishes the conflicts between a player's goals for his/her PC.

<snip>

What is maintained is not "momentum towards a goal". What is maintained is momentum, pure and simple.

<snip>

In my actual play example, finding black arrows rather than the mace doesn't maintain momentum towards the goal of recovering the mace. It significantly reduces that momentum. But it generates momentum in another direction, namely, bringing the potentially conflicting beliefs and goals of the PCs closer to a crisis point.

<snip>

The only thing that "fail forward" allows players to rely on is that their PCs will always be confronted by interesting and engaging challenges. And that is something that I do want the players in my game to expect. If I'm not delivering this, then I'm failing as a GM. (More on this below in this post.)

<snip>

(given that systems which emphasis "fail forward" are also likely to use some version of Let It Ride, or scene-based resolution, which means that repeats aren't possible), every failure is costing something vital to the PC and his/her goals.

<snip>

Note that this does not depend upon multiple competing goals, because the goals are only competing as a result of the failure. I think that that is clear in my actual play example.

<snip>

If the mage PC in my game had been successful in finding the mace in the tower, he would still have had complications and difficulties. Just different ones, related to whatever goal the player authored for the PC to replace the "get a mace" goal. (In BW all PCs have three Beliefs at all times, and a player is free to change any Belief at (almost) any time.) The difference between success and failure isn't about whether or not the PCs have challenges in front of them, but whether the unfolding path of those challenges is broadly reflecting the PCs' desires and goals, or thwarting them. A dramatically satisfying story tends to need a bit of each - constant failure can generate bathos, just as constant success can generate Mary Sue-ism.

<snip>

The fun of "fail forward" play is the creation of dramatic narrative by way of RPGing. Eero Tuovinen puts it well:

The fun in these games from the player’s viewpoint comes from the fact that he can create an amazing story with nothing but choices made in playing his character; this is the holy grail of rpg design, this is exactly the thing that was promised to me in 1992 in the MERP rulebook.​

I would hope that my actual play examples also illustrate that this is what the fun consists in. (Of course "amazing story" is a matter of degree - but B fiction is much more aesthetically engaging when you are spontaneously generating it as a participant with your friends.)

<snip>

What happens if, from the point of view of the players, the GM sets the wrong stakes? The answer is, if this happens repeatedly then the game will suck. That's why, as Eero Tuovinen points out in the same blog I already linked to in this post,

The GM . . . needs to be able to . . . figure out consequences. Much of the rules systems in these games address these challenges, and in addition the GM might have methodical tools outside the rules . . . and pure experience (helps with determining consequences).​

Ron Edwards also addressed the issue in a post about scene-framing techniques:

It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority )ie who gets to frame scenes and set stakes] you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the S[hared ]I[maginary ]S[pace] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.​

<snip>

As I noted upthread, there are also some GMs around who build boring dungeons. But that's not an objection to classic D&D in general. All games that are based around a GM require that GM to have the appropriate skills. (In my own case I think I'm not especially good at dungeon design, but am not too bad at narrating "fail forward"-style consequences that keep the game moving in a manner that engages my players.)

<snip>

flexibility with respect to backstory, in combination with the general frailties of human preparations and anticipation, mean that there are absolutely always consequences that can be imposed without contradicting the established backstory.
 


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