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

[AbdulAlhazred]

I haven't played any myself, but I've seen narrative folks here describe player authoring in ways like the party coming to a new city and one of the players announcing that there is a blacksmith there that he knows because the blacksmith is good friends with his uncle. That example would be the player authoring in a friendly blacksmith directly, not using the character to influence the game world.

And I know I've seen other examples over the years of players authoring fiction directly.

The authoring of fiction in Narrativist play is quite structured, in general. For example in DW the 'blacksmith scenario' could proceed in several ways:

1. The GM describes such an NPC as part of some PC action declared by a player; like asking around town for one.

2. The GM asks some question of a character which is answered with a description of such a blacksmith.

3. The player declares a Spout Lore pertaining to the question of where to find a blacksmith and achieves a success result. The GM then provides the information.

4. A player describes a bond with a blacksmith from this town when creating new bonds.

Other moves may exist which are similar, I don't have every playbook memorized.

Note how limited each of these is. 2 is the most open-ended and would only happen due to a prompt from the GM. 1 and 3 only indirectly let the player describe something, as the GM supplies the actual words. 4 can be no more than a phrase or brief sentence.

Also note that all of these take place in actor stance. Only mechanical digressions are recognized from 1st person in DW!

 

[Lanefan]

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.

There's a pretty big difference between:

DM: "You try your best but can't get the lock open. All still seems quiet. What do you do?"

and

DM: "You try your best but can't get the lock open. Oh, and there's someone behind the door just started screaming her head off, something about 'Intruder!', and lights are coming on within the house. What do you do?"

You're quite right that the cook will very likely be mobile and not always in one place; which opens up the possibility that even if the thief fails his attempt to get in, she's not there to notice. Or, she's there but is either asleep or so engaged in what she's doing that she doesn't clue in that someone's trying to break into the kitchen. Or, she's not the only one with keys; maybe other staff members come and go through that door meaning someone unlocking the door is a common thing (and maybe the thief knows this, which is why he's chosen that door as his entry point in the first place). All of these would lead to my first DM narration, above.

And if he instead succeeds and does get in (i.e. rolls a success on the lock attempt) without attracting anyone's attention, if the cook is there their potentially noticing each other is a separate resolution, followed by resolving any interaction(s) they may have. One step at a time.

 

[Lanefan]

It seems like the game might be more interesting if the fiction actually included the stuff that you're saying it doesn't.

Sure. In fact going through the specifics of learning a new spell probably would be more interesting - the first time or two it came up. After that, it gets reduced to SOP or a handwave to save doing the same process dozens of times as different casters expand their spell repertoires.

Much like the party making camp. It's fun to go through the entire process once or twice in detail so as to establish what the usual SOP will be, what gear they have/need, and so forth; but gets pretty dull to go through this every in-game night they're in the field absent unusual circumstances.

Same for travelling through a new area for the first time: it's worth giving a more detailed description of what they see, the villages they pass through, etc. once, but I'm not going to do that every time they walk that same road - which could be dozens of times over the length of the campaign - unless there's something bizarre going on e.g. this time there's three feet of snow on everything, or one of the villages has burned down since they were last here.

 

[Faolyn]

Well, give that PbtA is such a fuzzy term it could include almost anything I guess that just being PbtA in itself doesn't contradict this experience. What is PbtA? – lumpley games

And as "Narrativistic game" is a non existent entity even in GNS theory before the entire GNS framework fell apart. I guess it doesn't make sense that something non-existing contradicts an experience..

However if a PC can "create aspects" I think that contradict with the spirit of "using only the abilities that PC has at their disposal." But I am not sure what you put in that.

It depends on what those aspects are and what game they're in. And if the PC can create aspects, then that does not contradict with "only using the abilities that PC has at their disposal" because creating aspects would be an ability they have at their disposal.

The other thing, as has been said, is that the game assumes that you are working within the fiction and not trying to play on godmode. So if the player can create aspects--again, whatever they are in this game--then they are doing so within the boundaries of their PC's abilities, background, etc.--which to me still counts as only using the abilities the PC has at their disposal. And as I said, the ability to decide or create things wholesale, like what the runes actually mean, is not necessarily a common ability in these games.

However there are people that want the rules to produce interesting events tailored to their characters. There are rules designed for that. And such rules will contradict with the stated prefered experience the way I understand "In essence, as a player I want to feel like my PC is there in the world, part of a larger setting and doing the best they can to achieve their goals with the tools that PC has."

I think such rules are very common in games that like to label themselves as "narrativistic" (whatever that means)

Agreed.

 

[Lanefan]

Ok, I think I now might have a way to express the concept I am getting at.
For a given part of a game mechanic there are at least 3 things that can be interesting to look at: What the game claim the mechanic represents in the fiction, what the mechanics actually does and what functions the mechanic has in the game. The first and second of these are what we typically find in the game text. The designer usually has a pretty good idea what function these are supposed to serve, but relatively rarely write that out except for certain key mechanics. We can generally make a good guess on the function based on what the rule does, but actual play is sometimes needed (a lot of the purpose of testing is to check if a mechanic is actually serving the function the designer expect it to)

At first glance this seems similar to the distinction between Rules as Written (RAW), Rules as Intended (RAI) and Rules as Played (RAP).

RAW is what the words in the book(s) actually say.
RAI is what the designer(s) wanted them to say and-or achieve.
RAP is how the rules are interpreted and applied either at the table you're sitting at or by a broader community e.g. this forum.

Early-era D&D is famous for its sometimes-huge gaps between these three things; later-era D&D isn't (relatively) as bad but there's still some holes, and I posit it's almost impossible for any system to perfectly line up all three.

And while stupendous amounts of thought, ink, and pixels have been spent discussing RAW vs RAI over the decades, in the end the only one that matters in the here-and-now of any play is RAP; i.e. what you're doing at your table, right now.

Take strength in D&D5ed for instance. It is claimed to represent "measuring physical power". What it does is providing a modifier on checks the humans involved associate with the representation, affecting the probability of succeeding at a tasks.

If I were to guess at the functions of this mechanics I would suggest at least these 3:
1) A persistent characteristic of a character, informing the success rate of certain tasks over time (Informs the "simulation")
2) A player motivator to have the player in with high strength character engage in more strength related tasks/challenges. (Individual behavior priming)
3) A in-group role differentiator, giving the player with high strength character increased spotlight in situations where strength is beneficial. (Group behavior priming)

One thing to note is that these match up quite well with the fiction. We would expect a strong person to succeed more in strength related tasks, be more willing to engage in them, and step up to the task if the group need strength.

Now imagine a fictional game that is exactly like D&D5ed except the following: When declaring an action, both task and intent must be specified. If you roll equal or over dc, task succeed and intent happen. If you roll less than DC the GM has to narrate something really dramatic that brings the story forward. GM are in this case free to decide if the task succeed or not, but the intent at least isn't fully acheived.

If we now look at the mechanic of strength, we still have the same claim regarding what it represents. But what it does has changed. It no longer (purely) affect task success probability. Indeed it more strongly correlates with intent achievement. It also strongly affects the probability of dramatic stuff happening in situations where strength is involved.

How does this affect the functions? Depending on the motivations of the group 2 and 3 might still be relevant, but for groups that really seek mayhem and drama it could have the oposite effect! And the first function is almost completely obliterated, as a weak character that inspires the GM to think of good succeed with complications might very well succeed more often in strength tasks than a high strength character that inspires the GM to think of more failure with twist scenarios.

This is where my claim about FF/intent on success games come from. The most likely function I can see for strength in this scenario (also informed by how people talk about how these games play) is as:
1) A narrative marker indicating what the player want the perceived value of the characters attempts to use strength should have in the fiction (Informs the narrative)
I think this still is still reasonably associated with the given in-fiction representation, especially when genre conventions is taken into account. However a trad player is used to the representation of physical strength to be used for a different set of game purposes.

This is why I think it can be instructive at least in a transition period to not think of the skill/strength in terms of inate ability (due to the associations with "wrong" game functions), and rather think of them in terms of the function itself.

I think this analysis while not perfectly matching any existing games, nonetheless is instructive in where actual differences lie.

Indeed, and points out rather nicely some reasons I don't care for the latter model.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm going to guess that these were pretty short cliffs and banks, if you were a kid, not the twenty, fifty, hundred, or even thousand-foot cliffs that PCs are going to climb.

Hey, they seemed big at the time!

I grew up on a rocky seacoast. To get from my house to the beach while staying on our property involved going down a steep bank (easy, because we'd put in some stairs to cover the rough bits) then after a bit of flattish ground climbing down a steep rocky cliff/bank to the shore itself; about a 30-foot drop of which about half was steep enough to be risky. I could get down that second bank OK but failed miserably every time I tried to climb back up. (there were other, much easier ways to get back up but they each meant a long detour)

Eventually I tied a rope to a tree, and whenever I went down that way I left the rope down; as climbing the bank aided by the rope wasn't a problem.

 

[Umbran]

There's a pretty big difference between:

DM: "You try your best but can't get the lock open. All still seems quiet. What do you do?"

and

DM: "You try your best but can't get the lock open. Oh, and there's someone behind the door just started screaming her head off, something about 'Intruder!', and lights are coming on within the house. What do you do?"

Didn't the whole cook thing come up as a "fail forward" or "success with complications" example? This seems more like critical failure - not only do you not get the lock open, but something else bad is brewing behind the door.

 

[Lanefan]

Didn't the whole cook thing come up as a "fail forward" or "success with complications" example? This seems more like critical failure - not only do you not get the lock open, but something else bad is brewing behind the door.

Critical failure is kinda my take on it also, but I think it came up as a fail-forward example to begin with; first from someone's blog then expanded on within this thread.

 

[pemerton]

It seems more like specifying what winning the lottery will amount to. What the prize is.

Yes. Given that there are - for practical purposes - infinite lotteries I can take part in, from the school raffle to the Italian lotteries that Australian lottery agents will sell me tickets for, I don't see this as a problem.

 

[pemerton]

Also note that all of these take place in actor stance. Only mechanical digressions are recognized from 1st person in DW!

This can't be known from the descriptions you gave.

For example, why does the player describe their PC as having a bond with a blacksmith? If it's because they're inhabiting their PC and that is what follows, then actor stance. If it's because they think that that is a bond that will help generate some desirable in-game payoff later on in the session, then author stance.