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

[pemerton]

I deleted my previous somewhat critical post about this, as I realise this might be essential and constructive.

First of, I read the quote itself as not excluding fail with no retry. (While I read the gold version of this exact section to exclude fail with no retry)

However you here point to that "approperiate" complications are defined other places in the game text. You do not seem to explicitely claim that these are part of the definition of fail forward as a concept. Rather these are parts of defining fail forward as implemented by BW? (And I presume you read these as excluding fail with no retry?)

That is: Fail with no retry is not incompatible with fail forward as a concept, but rater incompatible with certain implemenations of the technique given the principles of the implementing game?

Burning Wheel has a "no retry" rule - called Let It Ride. Torchbearer has a similar rule called Fun Once.

By "fail with no retry" do you mean "nothing happens, but you can't try again?" And are you asking if that could be a meaningful ramification of a test in Burning Wheel? My view is typically not: that is not really "two directions" nor "pushing the story in another direction". Is there an actual example you have in mind?

I mean, suppose that the only other possibility is reading the rune of prayer to Pazuzu: and so the "fail with no retry" means that the player is apt to be moved to have their PC read the rune. Maybe, in the right context, that could be a "fail forward". Is that the sort of thing you're thinking of?

 

[pemerton]

You can make up any terminology, and "standards" that you want. Doesn't mean that anyone else will agree with you when you use common descriptive language that is frequently used in RPGs. You can say you define "up" as "down" according to your terminology, just expect pushback and people telling you that it doesn't work that way.

"Faithful" doesn’t inherently require an external metric, it just requires a standard, and that standard can be internal. If I create a character and define their personality, motivations, and values, then I can measure my portrayal against my own intent. That is something to be faithful to.

Just because that metric isn’t external or universally visible doesn’t make it meaningless or invalid. Internal consistency is still a form of consistency. Dismissing internal intent as insufficient undermines the very idea of self-authored characters.

Here is the post that prompted this discussion of "faithful" portrayal of character:

in TRoS or BW, the player establishes their Spiritual Attributes or Beliefs based on their own priorities, and is able to control how they change and how they impact play. For instance, BW expects Beliefs to be broken as much as adhered to, and has a "reward system" for both possibilities. The system doesn't ask the player to faithfully portray their PC, but rather to make a statement by portraying their PC a certain way.

Do you two, and @Maxperson, think that I'm wrong about The Riddle of Steel and Burning Wheel? Do you think I'm wrong to say that the sorts of expectations these RPGs place on the player, as to how the PC is portrayed, differs from Pendragon? (Or GURPS, or HERO, or any other system which includes personality mechanics that are meant to shape how the character is played.)

 

[pemerton]

I mean, this whole "not make the characters' lives boring" is a Red Herring. Even if the characters are bored out of their minds here and there shopping or traveling, they still adventure, find loot, become pirates, talk to dragons, walk other planes of existence, and more. Their lives quite literally can't be boring if you're actually playing the game.

The only concern with regard to boring that the DM needs to be concerned with is the players. You don't want THEM to be bored. That's my true agenda. I don't want my players to be bored.

No one wants their players to be bored. That's not what Make the players' characters' lives not boring is addressing. As @Campbell pointed out, the agenda pertains to the PCs, not the players.

 

[pemerton]

This was about how Beliefs work in Burning Wheel. The game doesn’t require you or expect you to define your character’s Beliefs and then stick to them. It rewards you for changing Beliefs as well as upholding them.

Right. Here's an example, the I already posted upthread I think:

We discussed how we would get through the first door, and my friend - reviewing Alicia's spells - noticed that she has Chameleon. So he decided she would turn invisible.

Chameleon is 8 actions to cast, but we were in no great hurry and so he decided to cast as carefully as possible - x8 = 64 actions to get +4D (the maximum bonus, equal to the spell's Ob 4).

With Alicia's B5 Sorcery reduced to B4 by the lingering effects of the bad pie, this was 8 Sorcery dice. Alicia's Will of B4 was reduced to B3 by the Light wound. And she had 1D of Forte (B4 reduced to B3 by the wound, and 2 tax remaining). That was 12 dice in total, to allocate to two test against Ob 4 (casting and tax; casting patiently allows allocating Sorcery, but not Will, dice to the tax check). I think a Persona may have been put into one of the pools, but in any event both failed: she took 1 tax (and so once again fell unconscious) and the casting failure was garbled transmission. This is the first time we've ever had that result in our BW play, and we rolled diligently on the Wheel of Magic. Instead of a Control Heaven, Personal Origin, Sustained duration effect on the Caster, Alicia had created a Transmute Water, Presence Origin, Instantaneous duration Natural Effect.

We discussed a bit what this might mean. After one false start (my initial idea that she had transmuted some water in the harbour went nowhere) I suggested that her eagerness for money meant that she had transformed the rain in her Presence into coins! My friend suggested low-value coins - copper pieces - and we agreed it was a 1D fund.

<snip>

Alicia was now lying, unconscious, in a pile of copper coins that had "rained" down on her. We agreed that Grellin, who is unused to such sorcery, was struck with awe by the Ob 7 Steel test for witnessing pronounced sorcery. Aedhros, on the other hand, could only see yet more evidence of the ill fortune and ineptitude that brings all things to ironic ruin. At least, until . . .

My friend was urging me - mightn't Aedhros have at least a hint of pity left in his heart, and be moved by Alicia's plight? Aedhros's relevant instinct, here, was Never use Song of Soothing unless compelled to - Song of Soothing being the Elven equivalent of herbalism. There was also his Belief about why he can stand Alicia's company - would that remain unshifted even seeing her so broken even as her poverty was slightly lifted?

I told my friend I would make the Song of Soothing test, and see where that led me. The obstacle for a Light wound is Ob 2, doubled for no tools. The skill is open-ended (natural Elven magic), and so despite being B3 plus 1D from my Rhyme of Rules FoRK, I was able to get my four successes and restore Alicia to consciousness. We then played out an exchange in which we both went for Mouldbreaker - Aedhros's Belief is now Only because Alicia is not entirely without capability can I endure her company. Alicia's Belief that The strong do what they may - I will do what I must to survive was changed by the fact that Aedhros had had her utterly under his power, and with coin all about her to be taken, and yet had healed her instead: now she Believes that I will be compassionate to the poor.

I narrated (again, wearing my GM hat) that the raining coins had attracted the attention of the ragged poor who huddle about the docks even when it is raining. Alicia's player decided to give them money - and having earned a Persona point from Mouldbreaker spent it to amplify her 1D fund so as not to lose her fund from tax. But both his dice were failures, and so the fund was spent being compassionate to the poor!

Of course, there is an in-fiction rationale for both PCs' changing their Beliefs. That pretty much goes without saying! But there is no dictation of a change, either by the fiction or by the system. It is a player choice. It helps establish the details of the rising conflict across a moral line.

And here is something I posted about 3 years ago, that elaborates a bit on the point I was making upthread, about the difference between this sort of "narrativist" approach to character and a more "sim"-type approach:

Edwards says the following:

In Simulationist play, morality cannot be imposed by the player or, except as the representative of the imagined world, by the GM. Theme is already part of the cosmos; it's not produced by metagame decisions. Morality, when it's involved, is "how it is" in the game-world, and even its shifts occur along defined, engine-driven parameters. The GM and players buy into this framework in order to play at all.

The point is that one can care about and enjoy complex issues, changing protagonists, and themes in both sorts of play, Narrativism and Simulationism. The difference lies in the point and contributions of literal instances of play; its operation and social feedback. . . .

Therefore, when you-as-player get proactive about an emotional thematic issue, poof, you're out of Sim. Whereas enjoying the in-game system activity of a thematic issue is perfectly do-able in Sim, without that proactivity being necessary.​

This is why Pendragon is good for simulationist play - the thematic stuff is all built into the virtue and passion stats and associated mechanics - whereas Prince Valiant is good for (rather light-hearted) narrativist play - many of the situations are the same as they would be in Pendragon, but it is the players who have to "get proactive" and decide whether they want their PCs to be Galahad types or cowardly varlets or something else. And the system won't judge those choices - only the other players will!

This also relates to something I quoted from Edwards upthread (or in one of the parallel threads):

The design decisions I've made with my current project are so not-RPG, but at the same time so dismissive of what's ordinarily called "consensual storytelling," that I cannot even begin to discuss it on-line. I can see the influences of Universalis, The Mountain Witch, and My Life with Master, but I cannot articulate the way that I have abandoned the player-character, yet preserved the moral responsibility of decision-making during play.​

That idea of "moral responsibility of decision-making" is the other side of the coin of "getting proactive". There's no scope to say "the system made me do it" or "my alignment made me do it" or "I was just playing my belief".

And we can make the point concrete by contrasting Burning Wheel with Fate:

* In Fate, you earn Fate Points for accepting a compel (ie go along with a proposed complication that reflects your character's aspect(s)), or for having an aspect that is attached to your character invoked against you (ie someone complicates your PC's life by reference to something that pertains to your PC).

* In Burning Wheel, you earn a Fate point for manifesting a Belief in play, you earn a Persona point (a bigger fate point) for closing off a Belief in play, you earn a Persona point for Embodiment (defined as roleplay that captures the mood of the table and drives play forward), and you earn a Persona point for Mouldbreaker (defined as vivid roleplaying the making of a decision where the imperative of the situation conflicts with a Belief).​

The logic of Fate is to drive play towards reinforcement of the character. The system makes that happen. The player is responsible for their PC build, but the system tells them what decisions are reasonable ones, once the play gets going.

Whereas Burning Wheel puts the need to choose squarely in front of the player. You can't just say "I was playing my Belief" - why didn't you shoot for Mouldbreaker? That's what makes it narrativist and not sim.

 

[pemerton]

Players ask so many questions because there is an objective world that exists and the GM's words are the only true source of information on that. There's no CGI where they can see what precisely is and isn't there themselves. And while a verbal description does a good job of saying things that are there, verbal does a terrible job of telling what isn't there.

I realise this. But it involves the GM telling the player what the PC experiences, and hence what the PC believes.

Since the world in this playstyle is objective outside the PC's then there is an objective standard to measure delusion against. There's no power struggle here, just deluded players if they think this will actually make the Chamberlain smelly.

What you say only works if the GM controls some of what the PCs believe - eg if the GM controls what the PCs believe about their immediate environment based on their present experiences.

The only delusion the player had was in believing the slogan "Players control what their PCs believe".

I think it's mostly so that the GM doesn't have to do a 10 hour long lore dump at the start. Practical concerns. And also, even if he did, it's not like the players are going to retain that vast amount of detail.

Again, this involves the GM telling the players what their PCs know and believe.

But also, there is of course an alternative to the "lore dump": instead of having the GM exercise control over the PCs, the players can exercise control over the setting.

I've never seen this occur in my life. I doubt anyone has. There may be some example that gets to your point, but dodging in combat is not one of them.

I have seen players contest GM narrations of how their PC failed.

In my experience, the most common solution to these various power struggles is for the GM to lay down the law. This observation is part of what makes me believe that a lot of RPGing is rather GM-driven.

 

[Lanefan]

Look, I wasn't there and won't pretend to know what was going on. OTOH I do think it's very likely that the player being complained about was misbehaving. It just strikes me as very odd to attribute that behavior to a detail of their character. A sober evaluation of the situation is very likely to reveal that you've inverted cause and effect here. He was portraying his character in a certain way in order to be an arse. But there's a billion ways to do that. Outlawing one of them is not really a fix. In this case, maybe it served as a clue hammer and he shaped up, but then forever banning entire possible backstories serves no real purpose.

Seems to me the player's just taking what the game allows him to take. Nothing "arse" about it.

If you don't want the player to take what the game gives, tweak the game so the game doesn't give it (simply asking the players not to take advantage is exactly the same tweak only soft-coded, might as well just hard-code it and get it over with).

Failing that, if the other players complain about someone having an unfair advantage they should first be looking in the mirror and asking why they themselves didn't think of it first.

 

[pemerton]

why can't doing the inventory management be contained either at the start (low conflict) such that conflict rises from there or as part of the conflict is resolved phase. If either of these framings are possible then the amount of table time spent on inventory management doesn't matter (in this specific way). It's still part of the rising conflict.

<snip>

why can't that room be treated holistically as one step in the rising conflict? I'm laying aside the moral line question for a moment, because I'm examining whether this meets the rising conflict criteria first. And if not, then why not.

I don't know what you mean by "rising conflict" or "rising action". I don't see a long discussion of how many pitons the PCs have, how much rope they have, whether they can rig something up to cross the frictionless room, etc as fitting any account that I'm familiar with.

Edwards discusses the issue here:

Simulationist play works as an underpinning to Narrativist play, insofar as bits or sub-scenes of play can shift into extensive set-up or reinforcers for upcoming Bang-oriented moments. It differs from the Explorative chassis for Narrativist play, even an extensive one, in that one really has to stop addressing Premise and focus on in-game causality per se. Such scenes or details can take on an interest of their own, as with the many pages describing military hardware in a Tom Clancy novel. It's a bit risky, as one can attract (e.g.) hardware-nuts who care very little for Premise as well as Premise-nuts who get bored by one too many hardware-pages, and end up pleasing neither enough to attract them further.​

My personal experience is that the "hardware pages" of Rolemaster play - which can take up many hours of play at high levels, where players have very intricate and technical choices to make about how to use their buff spells, their items, etc - or the "hardware pages" of White Plume Mountain-type play - which, again, take up a lot of time thinking about logistics, deploying gear, etc - are generally at odds with rising conflict across a moral line. Because they defuse the sense of momentum, anticipation and (pending) crisis. Managing starship finances in Classic Traveller also felt like this, and I ended up writing a simple spreadsheet to automate it between sessions, so that the player of the starship owner didn't need to worry about it.

Again speaking from my personal experience, the only RPG I know of that manages to integrate elements of "hardware pages"/logistical play with "rising conflict across a moral line" is Torchbearer 2e. There are a lot of complex system elements that combine to make this work; and the "narrativism" is not as clear or intense as in Burning Wheel, despite a number of system similarities.

I'm struggling to see why either of those instances are regarded as player-authored conflict across a moral line. Your talking about traits and whether the system or player gets to ultimately make a statement about the character.

To clarify, I don't see the conflict in this description at all. As to player authored I presume the difference is in player authored statement vs system authored statement (Side question - do systems author? and if not then who is the author here?) It's not clear where the moral line is either.

I didn't identify any moral line - that can be whatever you want, within the limits of what sort of play the RPG will support (eg both The Riddle of Steel and Burning Wheel default to a moderately gritty mediaeval-to-very-early-modern European fantasy).

As per my post not far upthread, which also includes some examples from play, the difference is between the system guiding or dictating the player's decisions about how the character acts, and the player being expected to inject their own judgement - taking for granted that we're talking about action that will ramify across a moral line. Pendragon's traits exemplify the first possibility. BW Beliefs and TRoS Spiritual Attributes exemplify the second.

I'd note that living world sandbox play often predominately features exactly these kind of open ended situations and 'factions' that you can choose to help or not. Often at the expense of others. Do you keep the Axe of Good Fortune for yourself, give it to the Dwarves, or give it to the halflings who have fallen on hard times. That is a moral question, right? The game itself provides benefits for any of those 3 courses of action. And while I would classify this kind of thing as a conflict, I'm not sure rising conflict can be applied to anything like this. Or maybe you can explain how it can?

I'm not seeing, in what you describe here, any rising action or rising conflict across a moral line.

If I accurately understand what narrativist is then I can explain why my play either is or isn't narrativist and where specifically it diverges.

Well, does your RPGing involves rising conflict across a moral line that is authored by the players? To break that down: What is the rising action in your RPGing? Does it involve a moral line? Is there conflict across that line? Do the players author that conflict?

When I GMed White Plume Mountain, I can tell you: the rising action, to the extent that there is any, arises when the PCs first encounter a trap/trick, or a monster. None of this involved a moral line, and so there was no conflict (player-authored or otherwise) across any moral line.

The last time I played AD&D 2nd ed, the rising action in the game included (among other things) questions about the PCs and their relationships to the gods and to a prophecy. Some of this involved a moral line, mostly around loyalties both within the party and to others in the setting. The conflict was not player-authored, and the more the players tried to take control of it the more the GM pushed back, until he eventually torpedoed the existing in-game context by teleporting the PCs 100 years into the future. The game ended not long after that.

In my 4e game, the rising action included (among other things) questions of religious and cosmological loyalty. This was a moral line: law vs chaos, gods vs primordials, mortals vs divinities, realism vs hope, etc. There was conflict across it: just as one example, would the PCs betray the Raven Queen to stop her amassing more power, even if this made it harder to achieve a peaceful future for the mortal world? And this conflict across a moral line was authored by the players, in that they were the ones who invested in this or that element of the setting, brought it to life, built and played PCs who had stakes and commitments in relation to it, and then made the choices that escalated some conflicts while resolving others. I posted a couple of play examples upthread.

 

[Lanefan]

But as has been explained to you many times, the cook is not unrelated to the lock picking.

That's just it - the cook should not be in any way related to the lock picking!

Two unrelated binary options giving four possible outcomes:

Pick succeeds, cook present
Pick fails, cook present
Pick succeeds, cook absent
Pick fails, cook absent

You're the one who keeps trying to tie these two independent things together and some of us just ain't gonna buy it no matter what sales technique you try.

And fail forward, when used well, doesn’t involve “unrelated” things.

There's been some other examples where the "fail forward" (still think it's a stupid term) results have IMO been quite well related to the task being attempted. A failed climb where the climber gets stuck and now the rest of the group have to figure out how to get her back down safely. A failed attempt to bribe the gate guards sees them arrest the bribing PC and put him in the stocks.

But picking a lock somehow generating a cook where there wouldn't have been one otherwise - yeah, that's unrelated. That there might be a cook there isn't completely out of line given the fiction, but IMO her presence or absence has to be determined independently of the pick-locks attempt (and ideally before the locks roll is even made).

 

[pemerton]

That's just it - the cook should not be in any way related to the lock picking!

<snip>

But picking a lock somehow generating a cook where there wouldn't have been one otherwise - yeah, that's unrelated. That there might be a cook there isn't completely out of line given the fiction, but IMO her presence or absence has to be determined independently of the pick-locks attempt (and ideally before the locks roll is even made).

Heaven forbid that the fiction in a RPG be affected by (i) the actions the players declare for their PCs, and (ii) their success or failure when they roll for those actions.

If you, @Lanefan, wish to narrate failed burglary in your preferred way, that's your prerogative.

But it is obvious that failed burglary is related to startling people. That's one of the main ways a burglar can fail! You prefer a system where the GM decides if that sort of failure occurs, independent of the player's declared action and roll for it. But your preference is not universal, and is certainly not normative.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm not familiar with the Anthology Engine, just the In A Wicked Age rulebook.

My comment about talking is based on this from p 12:

Roll dice when one character undertakes to do some concrete thing, and another character can and would try to interfere. Every player with a character involved, including you as GM, rolls dice for their own character. If you have more than one NPC involved, roll separate dice for each.​

​

Don’t roll dice when two characters are having a conversation, no matter how heated it becomes; wait until one or the other acts.​

I think I get what it is doing. But I've stumbled over it a few times when GMing.

Using only slightly different terms, this seems to be exactly what I already do: the characters (PC and NPC alike) can yell at each other all they want and the dice stay in the bag, but if-when such a dispute gets beyond words and into action such as spells, shoving, weapons, etc. then out come the dice and we go into a combat situation with initiative etc.