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

[Enrahim]

You can define "situation" that way if you like. I wasn't.

How do you define "situation" in a way that exclude my example, and still matches everyday usage?

 

[JConstantine]

I thought I was pretty clear. If you can't get players to agree to the rules and tone of the game, to the point that you can't play the game, why play with them.

You seem to be suggesting that if you can't align on X game, then don't play any game with them at all; while @Micah Sweet is suggesting that if you can't align on X game, but can on Y game, then play Y game. I suppose it's a matter of how much energy one wishes to expend on such things.

 

[pemerton]

Then why is it called, "fail-forward" if it sometimes doesn't mean failure?

It is talking about succeeding or failing on a roll.

Also, there is an assumption in most of the posts on this thread that all that is at stake, in a roll, is some tactical or operational question, such that the only way to fail is for the attempted task to not produce all the goodies that were hoped for.

@thefutilist pointed to this not too far upthread:

This is why it's worth asking, why use resolution mechanics in the first place. What are they for? what's the fun of the game? The resolution mechanics fit within a broader framework, how does it all hang together?


Take Apocalypse World and the cook. Now AW can be interpreted a few different ways but I'll give you my interpretation.


Say we've established that there is a water purifier gadget owned by the Flyswat gang. They'll trade it to us but they want a lot of gasoline, far more than we want to give. So one us (Midnight) goes and decides to just steal the purifier gadget.

That's two moral choices right there. So then we use the system to see what happens next. Midnight is going to sneak in and that means an act under fire roll. the fire is she'll be discovered.


So we have three outcomes: The MC has a few choices on a partial, the one I might do is below


Hit: She gets' the gadget and isn't discovered.

Partial: A cook discovers her but there is still a chance to remain hidden

Failure: A guard discovers her and alerts the whole compound.


On a hit all is well good. On a partial, the cook discovers her and I give her an ugly choice, the cook is surprised as she is but Midnight is quicker. She can slit his throat before he screams. We're now asking a few different moral questions. Is the purifier worth killing over is a big one.

On a miss: She'll have to gauge whether she can fight her way through to the purifier at all. If she can then she's got the same moral choice, she'll be having to kill a load of people.

Now the MC could actually just contrive some Sophie's choice type stuff and throw it at the player. Gating it behind the roll does a few things. One is shows the worth of the particular approach, how well did stealth work out. In the broader context of the game it allows us all to be a bit more surprised because the story will be wilder than the GM just presenting A or B pathways.

There's also an argument that this type of Sophie's choice scenario is still a bit too contrived. In fact if you look at the edition changes between 1E and Burned Over (3E), 3E constrains the hard choices a bit more on the partials. Where as this example is ripped straight from the 1E book (it's a ganger and not a cook but the same scenario)

Contrast with your choices about the Bakery delivery. Those seem to be strategic choices, there are better and worse options relative to the goal. You can just screw up by not being smart enough (playing well enough).

In the Burning Wheel game in which Aedhros was singing, and was accosted by the guard, the significance of the failure is not that he couldn't sing (of course he can sing), and not even that he didn't get a bonus die to resist Thoth's bullying (although that would have been nice), but that his attempt to re-orient himself as an Elf, rather than a spiteful Igor-like figure, failed. This was reinforced when the Circles test failed, no Elf came to his aid, and so he found himself having to bribe the guards to get them to leave him alone.

This is not quite moral ( @thefutilist's term) but still sits within the realm of value, and could be characterised as ethical.

I made a similar point in reply to @The Firebird upthread: not all connections, or relations, between things are causal/instrumental ones.

 

[Enrahim]

But we've also been told that fail forward means something happens and that the door remaining locked is not adequate.

Door remaining locked can very well be adequate. But there might be guards chasing you around, or all your lockpicks are now trash, or the door has suddently started laughing hysterically because you tickled it too much. All of these are dramatic changes to the situation, and I think that might be the qualifier that is most helpful for understanding what sort of situation change we are looking for (ref @pemerton )

 

[JConstantine]

Except that that "take X component from Y spell" thing never actually happens. It doesn't get shown. It doesn't get played out. It doesn't get referenced in the slightest.

But they never SHOW experimenting with the two spells. They never SHOW "developing" the new spell. It never happens "on-camera". It is 100% completely implicit.

Please stop with the absolutes. This is very much (one of) the sort of thing I enjoy doing in RPGs. Admittedly, I don't always get to indulge in it because others at the table aren't really into it and I don't want to hold them hostage as it were, but that's a playstyle clash/table culture problem.

 

[pemerton]

I don't understand why you just don't acknowledge the that player made a declaration that had the potential to change the fiction of the world. I don't care how you word it.

I don't know why you don't acknowledge that I introduced the example as an illustration of a player's action declaration establishing some backstory element; and I even drew the contrast with TB2e which takes a different approach to backstory from MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic:

What this example, and the cook example I describe just above, take advantage of is that human beings have the ability to create interesting fiction spontaneously. Including about who is in the kitchen or what the strange runes say. And it is possible to build a game in which the fiction that gets created is shaped by its creator in ways that fulfil, or dash, the hopes other participants in the game have for what the fiction will be. And it is possible to build a game, like the one described in the previous sentence, where the participant's hope is personified, in the fiction, as the hope of a particular character who finds themself in the imagined situation, in respect of which the hopes for how it will work out are arising. And where the determination as to whether they win or lose, in respect of this hope, is determined by rolling dice.

The game I've just worked out in the previous paragraph will be a RPG. It will have some similarities to other RPGs, and some differences. It may draw on prep to a great degree, a modest degree, or (as my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy hack did) almost no prep at all. The way any prep is drawn on to shape narration can be quite different too, from RPG to RPG.

If you assume that questions of who is in the kitchen or what the runes say, by their nature, should be answered in prep (or by an improv GM making a decision that emulates the function of prep), then of course you will reject some RPGing that makes different assumptions about what should be, or needs to be, prepped. But there is no normative basis I can see for the assumption that any sort of fiction should be prepped. Different games do this differently. In the past 10 years I've GMed a dozen or more different RPGs, nearly all of which take different approaches to prep. In my Torchbearer 2e game, strange runes were handled completely differently, because the game assumes a higher degree of prep-based GM authority over backstory:

You seem to think that this is some shocking confession or revelation. When it's the point of adducing the example.

 

[Faolyn]

Because they're good people that bring a lot to the game? Different people have different strengths and weaknesses, and being good at getting on the same page with others is only one of them--and, IME, not by far the most common.

Yeah, OK, but if they (generic they here) are actively messing up the game because they can't or won't agree to the tone and rules, then I doubt that the good things they bring to the game matter, because they're making the game unplayable, or at least unfun.

 

[JConstantine]

What I find curious is that every game I’ve run for strangers seems to end up with everyone on the same page. But games I run for friends often don’t. This all has me thinking. Maybe alignment isn’t a happy accident but a product of how we do things.

I think the reason for this is that with friends, we're friends with them for a reason - shared interests, shared values, etc. - so we have a tendency to presume we share more in common than we actually might, whereas with strangers, we make so no such assumptions. This contributed to the development of safety tools, and why vetting with questionnaires for games with stranger is increasingly more common.

 

[Pedantic]

Metacurrencies are a resource in the same vein as spell slots, power points, X uses per day abilities, etc. There's an entire strategic layer to their use that is absolutely gamist.

Edit: I've seen @Thomas Shey said much the same thing, and your reply, so I'll assume said reply also applies here.

I think there is something here, depending what the metacurrency in question does. Especially when it's a system layered on top of a heavier game, the function of metacurrency is often to let the player alter the gameplay loop. You could deal with the difficult to climb walls, or you could spend a plot coupon style meta-currency to introduce a rope from an older, forgotten expedition. The gameplay goes from picking between fixed DCs to get through a challenging area, to negotiating a change to the fiction with the GM.

Technically it's resource management in both cases, but I think the negotiation layer is the salient difference.

 

[JConstantine]

I want to see characters more often go to the toilet.

But I picture characters do need to go to the toilet.

You know, this puts your username into an entirely new light. Good that you're staying hydrated, though.