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

[JConstantine]

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

I don't believe I specified where I drew the line, but rather noted that others in this thread probably draw the line elsewhere from Harper.

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

Not truly. My only experience with AW specifically is an actual play session I watched years ago run by Baker, involving Harper (and others), which included character creation.

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.

I noted in one reply to @Campbell that my playstyle was similarly hybrid, so I expect you would find it a mix of the above.

 

[pemerton]

As DM I judge the result of an action based on the action that failed and only the action failed. If there are other simultaneous events happening, those may play out differently based on whether or not they succeeded at their action.

When I read this, I see a description of GM-driven play.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yes, the play of MHRP/Cortex+ Fantasy that I described would be characterised by @AbdulAlhazred as narrativist play. It is pretty light narrativism in thematic terms, but I suspect comparable in that respect to some of AbdulAlhazred's Dungeon World play.

But I have no idea how you think that what I described in some way contradicts this from AbdulAlhazred:
The play I described did not involve a "competitive skill-test model of play". There was no "subversion of opposition by some meta-channel". The player did not petition anyone. They played their character in the situation - which is what AbdulAlhazred calls "exploring the nature of my character and/or some other elements of the fiction that form the premise". In particular, the player chose to have their character pursue the expedient option of escape. This theme of expedience emerged again, when the same player had the same character escape from the dungeon with Dark Elves' gold which he stole, while the other PCs were slogging it out with the Dark Elves and then had a long trudge back to the surface without their scout/guide.

That is player-driven rising action across a moral line - narrativist play - although as I said the thematic content is pretty light.

I also have no idea how you think that the play that I described in some way contradicts this from @Campbell:
What Campbell is calling for here is that the player advocate for the character and not something external to the character. In the episode of play that I described, the intent was the character's diegetic intent - ie to read the runes with the hope that they would show a way out. The player was not expressing a hope for the scene that was independent of their PC's intent.


Who?

That is, who in this thread do you see using failure narration to push the focus of play away from the player's concerns for their PCs?

I mean, I've just shown that you have drastically misread both AbdulAlhazred and Campbell. Your misreading appears to have two causes: (1) you are looking for "gotchas", and are trying to find them by reading casual forum posts as if they were technical instructional or legislative texts (eg @Cambpell's point would be a bit clearer if it read "in games were intent is meaningful, I expect two things. That the intention is the character's diegetic intent and not merely the player's hope for the scene"); (2) you seem to be not actually grasping what motivates and drives "narrativist" RPGing.

In relation to (2), it is very striking to me that it seems not to have occurred to you (or other posters criticising this episode of play) that there are other things that the player could have put at stake in reading the runes, and that the choice to try and find a way out crosses a moral line. More generally, you seem to think only in terms of either instrumental/expedient action declarations (of the sort that are typical in "make it to the finish line" play of D&D and similar RPGs) or else in terms of "chaos"/"comedy" (like your Fiasco examples) that subverts any seriousness of the fiction and its themes.


As I read the thread, it seems to be people who are not very familiar with games that use "fail forward" or "no whiffing" as a principle who are trying to come up with general formulations, generally beginning from rejections of formulations that have been offered by those who have actually played Burning Wheel, Sorcerer, Apocalypse World, etc.

You have a copy of BW Revised. So you can see how, on p 34, it says this:

Two Directions . . . Failure is not the end of the line, but is a complication that pushes the story in another direction. Failure Complicates the Matter . . . the GM should present the players with the possible ramifications of their tests."​

That is "fail forward": failure complicates the matters, generates ramifications, pushes things in some or other direction. What counts as an appropriate complication or ramification; what sorts of directions should be introduced based on failure; depends on the other principles of the game. As well as, obviously, the current contents and trajectory of the fiction.

I don't believe that there is a problem of "naive fail forward" except in your posts. I've never encountered it as an account of a problem from actual play, as best I recall. Have you?

First, announcing future badness is not (generally) a hard move. It's not, in that example. Even putting someone in a spot is not (generally) a hard move, and in that example it's not. The hard move is having the NPCs make their attack and inflict harm.

Having not read the whole example, and thus having no idea why the GM has narrated that Plover and friends are attacking Marie, I don't see how you can possibly know how what the GM is doing in that excerpt is or is not related to what has previously transpired, Marie's character, etc.

This thread is not the place to try and teach you how to play Apocalypse World. I mean, I and others have posted things about it, and you have not believed us. I tell you that your imagined fears - of ridiculous comedy generated by a group of Fiasco players who somehow ended up playing AW instead - don't seem to me to have much basis in reality, but you don't believe me.

So why would I post more about the game, when you appear not to accept any of what I have said so far?

Are any of the trad-leaning posters here trying to play these games that feature FF and similar techniques? My understanding (which could be wrong) is that there is talk about using such ideas in a more trad game like D&D and its relatives. If so, such techniques would need to be viewed through the lens of the games they are to be used in, not the games they come from (at least not primarily) IMO, so that tweaks and adjustments can be made to allow play to run more smoothly. That may mean adjustments from either direction.

 

[pemerton]

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.

This is too confused, as an account of authorship of a novel, for me to make sense of. I simply reiterate that it is possible, and indeed utterly common place, for an author to introduce an element into a story without knowing everything about its origins, it meaning, etc.

Here's another example: I've read novels that refer to newspapers, but don't tell us what the headline was. It doesn't follow that the character was reading a newspaper without a headline - in the fiction it must have hade some or other headline.

Suppose that the novel has a sequel. Then, later on, the author could write in what that past headline was, if they wanted to and it made sense.

That's the remarkable thing about fiction: we can make it be what we want it to be!

 

[pemerton]

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?

This guy hopes his PC can kill the Orc. He rolls and is successful, and so the Orc is dead as he wanted.

Or . . .

This guy hopes that his PC can kill the Orc. He rolls and fails, and so the Orc survives, gets to have a turn, and kills the PC instead.

How is a hope roll different?

I hereby declare that all rolls in D&D are to be relabelled hope rolls!

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

I don't use the terms, "rising action" or "moral line" in my play, and I'm not really sure what they would mean in my games.

"Player-initiated" I get.

 

[pemerton]

Are any of the trad-leaning posters here trying to play these games that feature FF and similar techniques?

I don't know. There have been a lot of posts about how Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel work from "trad-leaning posters", but many of those posters do seem not to have read the rules or played the games.

My understanding (which could be wrong) is that there is talk about using such ideas in a more trad game like D&D and its relatives. If so, such techniques would need to be viewed through the lens of the games they are to be used in, not the games they come from (at least not primarily) IMO, so that tweaks and adjustments can be made to allow play to run more smoothly. That may mean adjustments from either direction.

I thought @hawkeyefan had posted fairly extensively about doing just this?

I know you don't count 4e D&D as a "relative" of D&D, but obviously I've posted extensively in this and other threads about action resolution in 4e D&D, which is "fail forward".

 

[Micah Sweet]

When I read this, I see a description of GM-driven play.

I accept that is your opinion. I and others have a different opinion. At this point I don't think there's any bridging that gap.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This guy hopes his PC can kill the Orc. He rolls and is successful, and so the Orc is dead as he wanted.

Or . . .

This guy hopes that his PC can kill the Orc. He rolls and fails, and so the Orc survives, gets to have a turn, and kills the PC instead.

How is a hope roll different?

I hereby declare that all rolls in D&D are to be relabelled hope rolls!

Did the GM decide that the result of the roll was or wasn't a dead orc? Did the player? In the runes example, the player expressed a hope, and the GM decided to make that hope real. They didn't have to. They could have provided some other beneficial result. They chose to make the player's hope manifest.

 

[pemerton]

I don't use the terms, "rising action" or "moral line" in my play, and I'm not really sure what they would mean in my games.

"Player-initiated" I get.

I was talking about an episode of my play, not yours. And the other posters I referred to were commenting on that episode of my play.

And, as I posted, not one of them observed that the situations was one of rising action across a moral line. It doesn't even seem to have occurred to them that it might matter - just as that does not seem to have occurred to you (at least until I mentioned it)?

The same thing is present in the blog about the screaming cook, as I've already noted - the blog poster notes that the presence of the cook gives rise to the possibility that the burgling PC might kill the innocent cook - but again no one who is criticising that example, and "fail forward" more generally, seems interested in that.

If you look at all RPGing on the assumption that what play is about is (i) the GM establishing and presenting some fiction, so that (ii) the players can manipulate that fiction via their PCs in order to solve a problem that the setting or situation has posed to them, then a lot of what I or @Campbell or @AbdulAlhazred have posted in this thread won't make sense.