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

[The Firebird]

But it's only because of the failure to drive. As were all the other consequences I posted. It's not independent; it's a direct result.

I disagree. The events you listed were of the form A --> B --> C, or even A --> B --> C --> D.

"You fail the license test" --> "you don't get a license" --> "you can't pick up your date" --> "you don't go on the date".

Or: "you are unable to drive" --> "you can't drive yourself to the store" --> "you have to pay someone to pick you up necessities".

When I say events 'A' and 'C' are independent, this is what I mean; there is some intermediate thing in between them.

This differs from "You fail the license test" --> "you don't get a license". Here the causal chain is direct.

The key difference is that something can intervene in the longer chain. E.g.,

"You fail the license test" --> "you don't get a license" --> "your date offers to drive" --> you go on the date".

"you are unable to drive" --> "you can't drive yourself to the store" --> "your store offers free delivery".

Whereas nothing can intervene to get you the license for the failed test.

 

[pemerton]

But there is a fictional environment in which the characters - PC and NPCs alike - inhabit, even if it's a undefined post-apocalyptic wasteland. That's a setting. Whether it has an elaborate, predefined history and geography like Forgotten Realms; a lightly sketched out one like BitD; is created collaboratively prior to/during play as in Microscope; or is simply implied doesn't matter - it's still a setting. This reads to me like you have an overly narrow view of what you consider a setting.

No one disputes that RPGing involves setting. (Except perhaps in some very marginal and/or avant garde instances.)

@AbdulAlhazred is pointing out that the setting, for AW, is not established or prepared ahead of play.

Okay, but I never said anything about it being owned? I said the setting was the purview (i.e. responsibility) of the GM. And Harper said "the MC is in charge of the world: the environment, the NPCs, the weather, the psychic maelstrom", which sounds an awful lot like my assertion. And I'm not seeing a meaningful distinction between that and what you've said here:

he GM is still in control of all the things the GM is typically in control of in a trad game, right?

When you read Harper's blog, do you notice the bit about the player establishing that the slavers use ears for barter?

Did you read the excerpts from the AW rulebooks that I posted, including this (p 113): "It’s especially important to ask, the first time each character opens her brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom, what that’s like for her."

You are drawing "the line" in a different place from where Harper does, and where the Apocalypse World rulebook does.

When people in this thread have talked about doing this sort of thing in a trad game, pemerton has considered it to be GM-driven/centred, but apparently player-driven in AW, or whatever games they've personally run. It really comes across as "that doesn't neatly conform to my specifics tastes, so it's GM-driven (read: bad), not player-driven (read: good)."

Do you know how the threat map is established, and used, in AW?

I know how AW works. It has almost nothing in common with "trad" play of the sort that is based around a GM-authored setting, GM-authored situation where the GM sets the stakes, map-and-key resolution, etc.

Whether your Vampire game more closely resembles AW or more closely resembles "GM-authored setting, GM-authored situation where the GM sets the stakes, map-and-key resolution, etc", or is different again (eg maybe it resembles Burning Wheel), I don't know. If you've posted this sort of information upthread, I've missed it or forgotten it, sorry.

 

[Lanefan]

But there's also no negative consequences for not opening the jar other than not opening the jar. Which means that, in a game, there's really no point to call for a roll to open the jar. Just look at the character's Strength score and make a judgement call. It's only if something will happen that you need to call for a roll.

That there's potential positive consequences (you get to eat pickles) whose achievement is uncertain - just how stuck is that jar, anyway - is enough to make it roll-worthy for me.

Also, "if you can't succeed with one method, try another" is still "nothing happens." It's puts the onus on the players to use a different method, rather than the GM.

And that's the whole point! It's on the players to find and try a different method, not on me-as-DM to hand them one. I'm only there to narrate the situation and then react to, and adjudicate, what they do.

 

[Maxperson]

Of course he did. But he wasn't making a "hope roll".

The player of a PC in D&D who rolls an attack hopes that the attack will defeat their opponent. But no one calls it a "hope roll". We call it an attack roll, because that's what the PC is doing.

Likewise, in the episode of play that I described, the PC was reading runes.

This guy hopes the runes say what he wants them to say. He rolls and is successful, so they say what he wanted them to say.

Or...

This guy hopes the runes say what he wants them to say. He rolls and fails, so they say something other than what he wanted them to say.

How is a hope roll different?

Why is a roll for something he hopes for and gets on a success, not just another type of hope roll?

 

[Lanefan]

Shall we set a time when everyone agrees to stop posting at once?

4:15 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, January 5th 2065.

How's that?

 

[Maxperson]

At the table it was not fixed. In the fiction it had been fixed ever since the runes were written.

They could, and they did.

Similarly, in The Big Sleep someone killed the chauffeur, even though the author - Raymond Chandler - didn't know who that was.

Only because it didn't matter. If it mattered, like the roll for the runes, he'd have known ahead of the character that hoped to find out halfway through the book, and that character's hope wouldn't have mattered at all with affecting who killed the chauffeur.

And just as how, in your spell example, the player chooses now to have their PC learn a spell, and thus it has been true for some time past in the fiction that their PCs was practising that spell.

I never once said that. He was practicing other spells that enabled him to learn how to construct the new spell. I never said or implied that he was practicing the spell he couldn't possibly have had before he leveled.

 

[pemerton]

With the farrier, it's was deemed well within the bounds of probability, not just possibility, whereas with the runes example, the player's hope just so happened to be true (thanks to a successful roll), which stretches credulity for those objecting to it, breaking their suspension of disbelief (this goes back to what @TwoSix, I think it was, about contrivance). This is what I suspect @The Firebird actually means by "harms verisimilitude".

Yes, as I posted already upthread, the issue is that it is high stakes. Though not only that: if I as GM had rolled on my Strange Runes table and got the 95-00 result "The runes reveal a way out of the dungeon" no one would object. It's the fact that it is player-constrained that gives rise to the objections.

As I also posted more recently upthread, one thing that is striking to me is that no other poster who has commented on this example has noticed how it involves player-initiated rising action across a moral line. (That line being one pertaining to expedience - ie escape from the dungeon - in a context where some of the PCs have been tasked to find the meaning of a troubling portent.)

That is, all the posters who have criticised the example of play are taking it for granted that (i) the focus of play is predominantly on the immediately instrumental and expedient, which (ii) involves (a) learning about the GM-prepped backstory/setting/situation so as (ii) to manipulate it, via action declarations, in pursuit of the immediately instrumental/expedient.

This is a focus of play that goes straight and directly back 50 years to the 3 volumes of original D&D. But it is not the only possible focus in RPG play.

 

[Maxperson]

4:15 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, January 5th 2065.

How's that?

Hmm. Given that it's 40 years from now, it's entirely possible I may stop posting before that date.

 

[Lanefan]

I guess we're at an impasse then. I think the only direct consequence of you driving exam is that you didn't get the license. The decision not to go on the date is indirectly connected but it is an entirely separate event. You could have made different plans. The failed exam does not dictate 'no date'. It only means that a very specific date plan isn't possible.

And so I think your way of look at it is a very strange way to look at real life. It's ascribing causality where there is none.

In fairness, there's certainly some causality to be seen there in hindsight - thing A led to thing B. But it's an indirect causality, because there were opportunities between the occurrence of thing A and the occurrence of thing B to divert the flow of events such that thing C or D or E occurred instead.

Now in the moment of teenage panic experienced on failing the driver's exam and realizing the date was probably doomed it's quite fair that these other options (e.g. alternate transport, reschedule the date, etc.) didn't quickly leap to mind; but that they didn't leap to mind doesn't deny their existence, nor their capacity to perhaps have changed the course of subsequent events.

 

[Lanefan]

Why shouldn't the GM try to make their game more interesting and less likely to grind to a halt due to a bad roll?

Because one of two things would quickly happen: either they'd feel overwhelmed with compounding badness or feel like I'm leading them by the nose.

Neither of these is desirable.