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

[clearstream]

What is happening that there is a die roll that determines whether the thing succeeded or failed followed by description of the event of success or failure. Almost all skill checks and similar work like this, and there is not anything retrocausal about it, the narration and the dice roll are the same event.

But like I have said many times, the issue with the runes is not that it is retrocausal, but that it is acausal. What is happening in the mechanics and what is happening in the fiction are disconnected, creating divergence in decision spaces. This is not some trivial technicality, but something has an actual observable effect on how the game will be played.

We've several times in this thread (at least as early as @Enrahim's take on process-simulation) referred to some sort of association with the state of affairs in the imagined world. I wrote upthread about two components of this

association parts of the written mechanic are associated with things that are accepted as diegetic​

entrainment processing the written mechanic follows patterns that map to the behaviours of those things​

​

Upthread I equated these with the qualities of being diegetical and para-diegetic. A question I have in relation to them is this

Q. Isn't it a fact that association and entrainment are about the experience of the mechanic by the player?​

 

[FrogReaver]

That is not an accurate description of the play of Marvel Heroic RP, or my fantasy hack of it, where the runes episode occurred.

Maybe it's an accurate description of some other RPG that I'm not familiar with?

There’s not really much to say if you can’t be specific about what is inaccurate.

 

[clearstream]

You're speaking of diplomacy, as in, the mechanically-expressed process of establishing mechanically-defined relations between participants in play.

Pedantic, if I understand him correctly, is speaking about freewheeling revision, as in, the GM and the players ad hoc rewriting the content of the situation purely on the basis of discussion between them, with the one and only standard being "the people at the table agree to do X".

Have you played Diplomacy, Dune, Catan, or Age of Wonders? I'm not aiming to denigrate your knowledge, but the way those games are played is that even though the subjects, outcomes and even sometimes the forms of negotiaton are tied to game mechanics, the negotiation itself is freewheeling.

The distinction, which I think you get at, is that the game-space of TTRPG is not limited to the board and pieces, as say Dune is, but extends into imagination. That means that the effects of negotiation extend into what the group will agree to imagine, itself governed by norms, principles and rules. TTRPG is sustained by healthy rather than degenerate lusory-attitudes in relation to those things, and that is true from the outset. It's not tied exclusively to negotiation (or another way it has sometimes been put is that it's all negotiation.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think you might be confusing "to obey" and "obedience" ref:

"Willing to obey" indicate obedience can be found even in a situation someone doesn't actually obey anyone. How would you envision such a situation?

Someone who has not yet been given an order but expects one. For example, a military officer assigned to assassinate a specific target using a sniper rifle. While some instances might give this sniper discretion to fire when ready, other cases, the sniper might be put in place and told to wait until they receive the order to fire. (E.g., perhaps command is hopeful that some other solution will prevail instead, making the sniper's would-be assassination unnecessary.)

Alternatively, consider the state your computer is in when it is idle because you've gotten up to use the bathroom. Within the limits of its physical and logical capabilities, it is under your absolute authority, especially if you use something like Linux. Thus it is "willing" (insofar as an inanimate machine can be said to be "willing") to obey--absolutely. The fact that you do not happen to be doing anything at all with the computer, because you happen to not be interacting with it in any way during those few minutes, has nothing whatsoever to do with the absoluteness of your power over it. And, indeed, there are many, many times where users cause themselves problems with their computers, specifically because they give the computer instructions that cannot actually be fulfilled, whether or not they know those instructions are incompatible, or indeed whether or not they even realize they've given instructions at all.

Simply because the power is not being exercised in that very moment does not mean the power is not there. A power that must not be exercised does not exist: you are obligated not to use it. Any power that does not fit into that category is a power that is intended to be exercised. Otherwise, you would be obligated not to use it!

 

[pemerton]

@pemerton out of interest when you use something like this in play, do you discuss upfront what the runes are should the PC fail their roll? Does the PC know that should they fail the roll, the runes will definitely be something negative? or perhaps even accidentally triggered?

In MHRP, by default the Doom Pool is simply an opposition dice pool. So the most immediate consequence of failing an action is wasting your turn. But the GM can spend Doom Pool dice to trigger effects on a successful roll of the opposition pool. It's also possible to give a Scene Distinction a SFX (eg On a successful reaction, you may use your effect die as if you had succeeded on an action) but the Strange Runes didn't have an SFX like that, which would probably fit better with Magic Runes.

So the player knows that, if they fail, there is the risk of a Doom Pool spend (and the worse they fail, the bigger the effect die of the reaction which will be converted into an actual effect). The effect itself, like everything in MHRP, would be die-rated (analogously to the d12 Lost in the Dungeon complication) and would figure in fictionally appropriate opposition pools.

As to what that effect might be, generally I rely on the trajectory of play to establish an implicit sense of exactly what is at stake. Sometimes I will be overt, eg if I think I have a brilliant idea for a consequence, or I want to taunt the player, or perhaps if the player asks.

Other RPG systems that I play regularly take different sorts of approach. For instance, in Burning Wheel on a failure generally the GM should be narrating a consequence that sets back the PC from the perspective of their intention. There is no "pool" or "cost" that the GM needs to draw on. Here's an example that pertains to identifying a strange object (it's from me posting on rpg.net):

One of the players had bought rulebooks and built a BW PC (a noble-born Rogue Wizard inspired by Alatar, one of Tolkien's blue wizards of the East). I had built a PC for another player to show him what the system was capable of - a spell-using necromancer ranger/assassin (hunter-wizard's apprentice-rogue wizard-bandit). . .

The rogue wizard, Jobe, had a relationship with his brother and rival. The ranger-assassin, Halika, had a relationship, also hostile with her mentor, and the player decided that was because it turned out she was being prepared by him to be sacrificed to a demon. It seemed to make sense that the two rival, evil mages should be one and the same, and each player wrote a belief around defeating him: in Jobe's case, preventing his transformation into a Balrog; in Halika's case, to gain revenge. . . . each also wrote up a immediate goal-oriented belief: I had pulled out my old Greyhawk material and told them they were starting in the town of Hardby, half-way between the forest (where the assassin had fled from) and the desert hills (where Jobe had been travelling), and so each came up with a belief around that: I'm not leaving Hardby without gaining some magical item to use against my brother and, for the assassin with starting Resources 0, I'm not leaving Hardby penniless. . . .

I started things in the Hardby market: Jobe was looking at the wares of a peddler of trinkets and souvenirs, to see if there was anything there that might be magical or useful for enchanting for the anticipated confrontation with his brother. Given that the brother is possessed by a demon, he was looking for something angelic. The peddler pointed out an angel feather that he had for sale, brought to him from the Bright Desert. Jobe (who has, as another instinct, to always use Second Sight), used Aura Reading to study the feather for magical traits. The roll was a failure, and so he noticed that it was Resistant to Fire (potentially useful in confronting a Balrog) but also cursed. (Ancient History was involved somehow here too, maybe as a FoRK into Aura Reading (? I can't really remember), establishing something about an ancient battle between angels and demons in the desert.)

My memory of the precise sequence of events is hazy, but in the context the peddler was able to insist on proceeding with the sale, demanding 3 drachmas (Ob 1 resource check). As Jobe started haggling a strange woman (Halika) approached him and offered to help him if he would buy her lunch. Between the two of them, the haggling roll was still a failure, and also the subsequent Resources check: so Jobe got his feather but spent his last 3 drachmas, and was taxed down to Resources 0. They did get some more information about the feather from the peddler, however - he bought it from a wild-eyed man with dishevelled beard and hair, who said that it had come from one of the tombs in the Bright Desert. Jobe, being unable to buy Halika any lunch, suggested he might be able to find some work for them instead.​

The consequence of failure - ie that the feather is cursed - wasn't expressly flagged in advance, but given the characters, their backgrounds and situation in the fiction, and their Beliefs, it flowed pretty naturally. My general test for this is whether the player groans or thinks its unfair. That didn't happen here!

At least for the rest of this session, the curse didn't have any mechanical effect. Rather, it provided context for narrating further failures, eg like this one:

Jobe, having both nobility and sorcerers in his circles, and a +1D affiliation with both (from Mark of Privilege and a starting affiliation with a sorcerous cabal), initially thought of trying to make contact with the Gynarch of Hardby, the sorceress ruler of that city. But then he thought he might start a little lower in the pecking order, and so decided to make contact with the red-robed firemage Jabal (of the Cabal). With Circles 2 he attempted the Ob 2 check, and failed.

So, as the 3 PCs were sitting in the Green Dragon Inn (the inn of choice for sorcerers, out-of- towners and the like), putting out feelers to Jabal, a thug wearing a rigid leather breastplate and openly carrying a scimitar turned up with a message from Jabal: Leave town, now. You're marked. Halika noticed him looking at the feather sticking out from Jobe's pouch as he said that: it seemed that the curse had already struck!​

And it also contributed to framing of scenes, like here:

The trip to Jabal's tower took them through the narrow, winding streets of the city. When they got there, Jabal was suitably angry at his Igor-like servitor for letting them in, and at Athog for not running them out of town. They argued, although I don't think any social skill checks were actually made. Jabal explained that the curse on the feather was real, from a mummy in a desert tomb, and that he didn't want anything to do with Jobe while he was cursed. Jobe accepted his dressing down with suitable Base Humility, earning a fate point. (The second for the session from a character trait. . . .)​

Sorry if the answer is a bit overlong, but I wanted to take the opportunity to provide some examples of the differences between systems that in this thread are often getting lumped together in remarks about how "narrativist" or "narrative" RPGs work.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Have you played Diplomacy, Dune, Catan, or Age of Wonders? I'm not aiming to denigrate your knowledge, but the way those games are played is that even though the subjects, outcomes and even sometimes the forms of negotiaton are tied to game mechanics, the negotiation itself is freewheeling.

I might have played Diplomacy, but if I did it was a long time ago. I have heard much of Catan, have not played it. I have played the video games of the AoW series (all but the first one, IIRC; good series!), but no board games.

Of the games I have played, I have never seen freewheeling negotiation in them. There are pretty hard limits on what you may negotiate over, how you may negotiate, and when you may negotiate. You cannot, for example, negotiate that you will stop using a hex-grid and instead use an octagonal grid drawn as squares (meaning, every square is adjacent to all of its cardinal neighbors and all of its ordinal neighbors, aka, the squares that it only touches at a single vertex, not an edge.)

Hence why I used the terms I did. Negotiation takes place in a defined manner, under strict rules (you can only exchange resources for other resources in Catan, as I understood it; please correct me if I'm wrong there.) You cannot negotiate the fundamental structure of the game.

The distinction, which I think you get at, is that the game-space of TTRPG is not limited to the board and pieces, as say Dune is, but extends into imagination. That means that the effects of negotiation extend into what the group will agree to imagine, itself governed by norms, principles and rules. TTRPG is sustained by healthy rather than degenerate lusory-attitudes in relation to those things, and that is true from the outset. It's not tied exclusively to negotiation (or another way it has sometimes been put is that it's all negotiation.)

It's not just imagination. You can negotiate the rules of the game themselves. You have ceased to play Dune, and you are now playing "whatever rules we have decided to replace Dune with, unless and until we decide to replace them with other rules", it just might be the case that that set of rules includes all members of the set "the rules of Dune" except those involving combat, or whatever.

 

[pemerton]

I've long said I don't like the player making backstory like that, so...ok?

Well, what you posted that I responded to was this: "My main issue with the runes example is creating the meaning of the runes by the player who would be specifically benefiting from the reading going their way."

I was pointing out that its pretty common for players to declare actions with the intention of gaining a benefit for their PC. So I don't see why you would object to that.

@clearstream has elaborated the point beyond my fairly simple statement of it, with interesting parallel examples like the trapdoor and the curse-removing NPC.

 

[pemerton]

This is why we won't be coming to an accord. We don't want the same things out of the game.

Quite a way upthread, I asked you why you seem unable or unwilling to talk about RPGing done in accordance with different principles to the ones you actually use yourself. This post of yours prompts the same question on my part.

I mean, I prefer Australian rules football to rugby (any version) as a spectator sport. But when I occasionally find myself watching or talking about rugby, I don't ask why the players aren't handballing, or kicking the ball down the ground. My preference doesn't make me incapable of understanding that rugby is played by different rules from Australian rules.

MHRP is not a map-and-key, puzzle-solving RPG. Is that really impossible to grasp?

 

[clearstream]

It's not just imagination. You can negotiate the rules of the game themselves.

Can you? Like any published game, a group may, and usually does, agree to follow the written rules according to its principles.

 

[FrogReaver]

Yes, but also, that's beside the point; in D&D clerics can change their spells with a long rest (or the characters could have sought a different cleric.) It's nickel-and-diming the example, rather than focusing on the observable fact that players use Charisma-related skills to determine fiction that was not yet settled. @FrogReaver fo vis.

For the cleric example to be the same the following would need to be true

1) the fictional constraints on the cleric (who he is, what he can do, what level he is, which god he serves, what they are a god of, what kind of people will the cleric or his god help, what’s his position in the church, etc), all of that would need to be so unconstrained that the cleric could be anything.

**note this isn’t an argument that being unconstrained leads to silly results, something you mistook this point for earlier.

2) on a success the players ‘intent’ would author some of those details about the cleric (which we’ve established are essentially unconstrained) such that the details would be ‘convenient’ for the player/character goal (probably the same but could theoretically be different).

3) then after all this, the dc of the persuasion check would need to independent of whatever is being asked for, as the dc for the runes is independent of whatever the player/character wants/hopes/conjectures them to be.

If you are going to elide all these details and claim the runes and persuasion as typically occurs in d&d are the same because on some extremely high conceptual level they both determine fiction not yet settled as if viewing things from that sole high level conceptual perspective is the only perspective that matters, or even a relatively important perspective, then there’s no wonder this conversation goes no where.

I mean at that point it’s essentially

Frogreaver: ‘There’s differences’

Counter: ‘They don’t matter because I can find some high level conceptual description that applies to both cases making them the same’

Hopefully the logical problem with this framing is apparent. Even if they are the same in some some way, that doesn’t mean they are the same in all ways.