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

[pemerton]

PC fails a save against a suggestion spell where the suggestion is to say, "Help! Help! The elves are killing me!" The PC's player then says, "Help! Help! The elves are killing me!"

How is that not a reason from the imaginary world why a person at the table says X rather than Y?

Are you using "reason" as synonymous with "cause". Because you are replying to a post which is one in a series of posts by me that talks about causation.

But in any event, the example you give can be fairly straightforwardly analysed. I will refer to two game participants, Person A and Person B, each of whom (in the example) is controlling one character. Person A's character I will call M and Person B's character I will call N.

*Person B says "N casts suggestion on M - Say, 'Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!'"

*People at the table - including Persons A and B - update their shared fiction: it now includes N casting a suggestion spell on M, and it further includes N saying to M, a part of the casting, Say, "Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!"

*People at the table consult the rules - either literally, or via recollection - and note that, in order to work out what happens next - is M ensorcelled? - it is necessary for Person A to roll a saving throw. [We could state the rule as follows: If, in the fiction, one character casts a suggestion spell on another character, then a saving throw must be made by the controller of that second character to determine whether the fiction becomes one in which they are ensorcelled by the spell, or remains one in which they are not.]

*Person A throws the d20, reads the result, performs any further arithmetic operations required by the rules (eg adding modifiers), and announces the final result.

*People at the table compare the final result to the target number that the rules specify for this saving throw. They note that the final result falls short, and thus the saving throw is failed.

*People at the table - including Persons A and B - therefore update their shared fiction in accordance with the rule I set out three dot points above: they agree that, in the shared fiction, M is ensorcelled to say "Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!"

*Person A, being a theatrical sort of individual, decides to perform, for the benefit of the table, this new aspect of the shared fiction, and so says "Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!"​

The causal processes here are mostly social ones - people say things to one another, agree on what to imagine together, and identify and apply rules based on that agreement to imagine. The rolling of the d20, though, is a straightforwardly physical causal process. And doing the arithmetic and comparing the numbers is a cognitive causal process, but not a particularly social process.

 

[Maxperson]

Are you using "reason" as synonymous with "cause". Because you are replying to a post which is one in a series of posts by me that talks about causation.

But in any event, the example you give can be fairly straightforwardly analysed. I will refer to two game participants, Person A and Person B, each of whom (in the example) is controlling one character. Person A's character I will call M and Person B's character I will call N.

*Person B says "N casts suggestion on M - Say, 'Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!'"​

​

*People at the table - including Persons A and B - update their shared fiction: it now includes N casting a suggestion spell on M, and it further includes N saying to M, a part of the casting, Say, "Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!"​

​

*People at the table consult the rules - either literally, or via recollection - and note that, in order to work out what happens next - is M ensorcelled? - it is necessary for Person A to roll a saving throw. [We could state the rule as follows: If, in the fiction, one character casts a suggestion spell on another character, then a saving throw must be made by the controller of that second character to determine whether the fiction becomes one in which they are ensorcelled by the spell, or remains one in which they are not.]​

​

*Person A throws the d20, reads the result, performs any further arithmetic operations required by the rules (eg adding modifiers), and announces the final result.​

​

*People at the table compare the final result to the target number that the rules specify for this saving throw. They note that the final result falls short, and thus the saving throw is failed.​

​

*People at the table - including Persons A and B - therefore update their shared fiction in accordance with the rule I set out three dot points above: they agree that, in the shared fiction, M is ensorcelled to say "Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!"​

​

*Person A, being a theatrical sort of individual, decides to perform, for the benefit of the table, this new aspect of the shared fiction, and so says "Help! Help! The Elves are killing me!"​

So the in-fiction suggestion spell caused the player to do that. Without the suggestion spell, the player almost surely doesn't say it.

The causal processes here are mostly social ones - people say things to one another, agree on what to imagine together, and identify and apply rules based on that agreement to imagine. The rolling of the d20, though, is a straightforwardly physical causal process. And doing the arithmetic and comparing the numbers is a cognitive causal process, but not a particularly social process.

What came before doesn't matter. The suggestion spell was the cause of those words by the player. Otherwise, we'd have to go back at least to the big bang as the cause for the social agreement there, because that's where the universe originated.

 

[pemerton]

comparing my approach to childish belief

Take that up with @Lanefan, not me.

mischaracterizing the Living World model as incoherent.

Please point me to where I said that.

I've just done a search of the use of the words "incoherent" and "incoherence" by pemerton. The latter word has appeared in one post by me in this thread, and that was because I quoted @Micah Sweet using it.

What I have said of the Living World approach to RPGing is that (i) it relies very heavily on GM decision-making (and you and other posters have given ample illustrations of GMs making decisions when GMing sandboxes), and (ii) the heuristics for that decision-making are somewhat obscure, mostly because you seem very hesitant to spell them out, but (iii) they seem to include plausibility and extrapolation from trends found in the GM's notes together with play, and (iv) they seem to self-consciously exclude consideration of what would be interesting, or challenging, or would put a particular PC under pressure because of features of that PC - this exclusion seems to follow from the repudiation of (so-called) "meta agency".

The emphasis is plausibility first, discretion second. My recommendation is to roll half the time and choose the other half based on what’s most fun or engaging within the set of plausible outcomes, fun that aligns with the group’s goals, not imposed narrative.

I don't understand what "imposed narrative" means here.

But "fun that aligns with the group's goals" appears to an instance of what you call "meta agency". Which based on your posts upthread, and as per what I wrote just above, I thought you rejected.

You roll because humans have biases. If you want the setting to feel like it’s alive, bigger than you, it has to produce outcomes that break out of your preconceptions. Periodic use of the dice keeps that feeling.

Yes, I realise this, it's a thing that a lot of RPGers have been doing for a long time.

Nothing I’ve described is an example of meta agency. Meta agency is part of player agency, it’s exercised by the players, not the referee. Players may talk to me during or after a session about their goals, that’s meta agency in action. But most of what I learn about their interests comes from listening to their in-character decisions, how they talk among themselves, and, when necessary, directly asking them, especially after consequential events.

So suppose that you talk to a player during a session about their goals, which is "meta agency" in action. And then you decide to do choose the outcome that is "fun that aligns with the group's goals" (as per what I quoted just above).

Again, I don't see how that is that not meta-agency.

As to multiple plausible outcomes: I either pick one or roll the dice. But I see what you’re doing, looking for an angle to sneak in an “aha” moment that authorial intent is secretly at play. It’s not. Living World techniques don’t turn the referee into a biological CPU, but they do expect them to exercise what Aristotle called practical wisdom.

<snip>

I encourage you to ask further questions, but understand that at this point, I don’t consider your posts to be in good faith. Nothing you’ve written reads as anything other than an attempt to defend your viewpoint and control the framing.

This is bizarrely hostile. And ironic, given the degree to which you insist that all discussion must be framed using your terminology (eg "meta-agency", which I regard as ultimately a pseudo-concept). I find you to be incredibly aggressive in your posting, ironically so given your habit of diagnosing anger in others.

You are also extremely quick to accuse others of mischaracterisation, although you have never responded to multiple posts I've made pointing out how you misdescribe Burning Wheel procedures - referring to notions like "story arc" which are not part of the system, and oddly so given that I've repeatedly stated the actual heuristics without shame. (You seem to have BW confused with Fate. When in fact they are radically different RPGs.)

And I also find your tone quite condescending: for instance, "I encourage you to ask further questions" followed by more personal abuse, most of which I've not quoted and which ends with an encouragement to put you on ignore. But you're not my teacher. Nor my superior. In the post I've quoted you even refer to Aristotle on practical wisdom, but Aristotle's account of practical wisdom has no relevance to anything you're saying about how to GM a RPG. Aristotle had nothing to say about how to extrapolate outcomes from an imperfectly-specified prior worldstate. Nor about how an author should decide what happens next.

 

[pemerton]

So the in-fiction suggestion spell caused the player to do that. Without the suggestion spell, the player almost surely doesn't say it.

Huh? Player B said a thing. Which changed the shared fiction - that's a change in an actual mental state.

The imaginary stuff didn't do anything. People's beliefs, and social arrangements, did things.

 

[pemerton]

Yeah, that can be true to a degree. I mean, in Dungeon World (which I am much more familiar with) equipment can definitely matter. If you are deep underground and run out of torches, that's not a good thing. However, the focus is unlikely to be on the mechanical disadvantages of stumbling around in the dark, Dungeon World doesn't actually spell any out, but more things like "I swore I would bring the halfling back to his mother" is now definitely in doubt when you're not sure where the heck said halfling IS in the inky blackness. Not to say that the operational concern is missing, the fiction associated with stumbling in the dark is most certainly far more rife with bad consequences than the one where you can see.

So, yes, a DW player will undoubtedly seek to avoid "we ran out of light sources", and that requires managing your inventory. HOWEVER, once again, things getting used up is not measured by any fixed formal notion of time, but happens when the GM makes a move. There may well be a sense of "yeah, you been milking that torch long enough, it starts to sputter" because DW has principles related to honoring the fiction, so that we can talk about when we're likely to be pushing our luck on torches.

It all hangs together, and it CAN be pretty operational, yet at the same time there's some level at which it is all related to PC concerns.

In my experience, equipment in Burning Wheel can matter, but not in the sort of operational fashion that is found in (say) Torchbearer 2e.

Consider tools, for instance: whereas a lack of tools in TB2e is normally a +1 Ob penalty, in BW it's a double Ob penalty. And this is cumulative with Beginner's Luck (whereas in TB2e BL halves your dice pool, in BW it doubles the obstacle) - so untrained and no tools is 4x Ob. So having or not having tools is a big deal for success. But the nature of failure narration means that a lack of tools isn't generally going to bring things to a halt; there's not quite the same oppressiveness as TB generates.

In my most recent play, Thoth has a Death Artist workshop. This means that we can have viable scenes that involve trying to reanimate the dead. But if he didn't have it, or if he lost it, it's not like the game would grind to a halt (cf a D&D MU losing their spellbook). The focus would change, a bit like what you describe for DW.

Maybe it's been done, but I personally can't imagine trying to play BW in the sort of logistical fashion that is advocated in classic D&D.

 

[clearstream]

Huh? Player B said a thing. Which changed the shared fiction - that's a change in an actual mental state.

The imaginary stuff didn't do anything. People's beliefs, and social arrangements, did things.

This suggests an interesting construction, where there are actual mental states matching or upholding what is imagined (which I assume must be counted into the causation of A's speech act along with inter alia beliefs, social arrangements and thespian propensities.)

And then there is separately "imaginary stuff" which is the pretend world apart from the players. A simpler construction might deny the existence of that world altogether.

So that when @Maxperson speaks of an in-fiction suggestion spell causing a player to say some specific words, they must be referring to a fiction represented upon mental states (along with physical ephemera, such as character sheets, sketches and miniatures.)

Which is to say that the disagreement here appears to be formed around the descriptions rather than the discounting of what is imagined as a cause of what a person goes on to say. Seeing as I don't take @Maxperson to be excluding beliefs etc as joint causes.

They could be saying that those other causes are not sufficient, even if they are necessary... which could also be where misunderstanding or disagreement lies (for instance both sides pointing out that the elements they're interested in are necessary, and the other insufficient.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think there’s just some resistance or whatever on their behalf to buying into your core assertion that “it’s all turtles GM decisions all the way down.” I’ll freely admit that when I run Stonetop I’m making a conscious decision about the next steps of play, right? Like, I’m prompting for table rolls; I’m picking a threat; I’m looking at the Dangers for an area and selecting a GM move to make. I’m trying to stay in accordance with my agenda and principles at all times, but I’m the one curating play such that the players have a “life filled with adventure in a rich and mysterious world” to paraphrase said agenda.

I think rigorous Blorb like refereeing with an emphasis on world-state tables, random rolls, etc is similarly principled play. The agenda is different, clearly (what would it be if we were PBTAing it - maybe “portray a consistent world / allow the player’s directions to have an impact / … something replacing play to find out”).

I mean, I don't really think it was designed with the idea of anything quite like PbtA-style Principles, but if I had to pick them they'd probably be...

• Author a consistent, persistent world
• Respond to character deeds in a grounded, iterative way
• Play to watch the world unfold

The first because so much has been made in the thread of consistency (I may have my grumbles, but it is at least the ideal aspired to), and all this talk of "causation" from imaginary things etc. is rooted in what, in a video game context, would be called a "persistent world", that is, a world which keeps on ticking regardless of whether the PCs interact with it.

The second because, IMO, it better captures what folks mean by things like "realism" and such. Groundedness is a much more useful term than "realism", IMO, because it jettisons the extremely problematic main meaning of "realism", namely, that it is nigh indistinguishable from our physical, concrete Earth that we live in, mainly because the world is absolutely chock-full of openly unrealistic, fantastical things, some of which people accept with barely more than a fig-leaf excuse because it's just expected of fantasy. Something can be extremely grounded while being totally unlike our real Earth, full of dragons and magic or aliens and FTL communication but still involving understandable and reliable rules (even if those rules are invented and in strong opposition to "realism"). Much ancient Greek statuary, for example, is openly unrealistic, inventing new muscles and such, but highly grounded because, even with those invented muscles, the bodies look like they could move and act the way we think bodies typically would move and act. "Iterative" simply captures in brief what is often (IMO unhelpfully) referred to as "rules as physics" or "a system as a physics-engine" or the like.

And then the third was the most difficult to select and is the one I'm (by far) least attached to, but...I can't really think of a better phrase for why folks choose to play such a style beyond wanting to see the changing state of the fictional space. In theory, that's the part the GM relinquishes some amount of control over, in order to permit player agency--they don't actually know what will unfold. They know the processes, but their knowledge of the inputs is merely vast, not 100% complete, as player choices are also inputs. The issue comes down, more or less, to the GM simply choosing to refrain from exerting more than a certain degree of control, control up to a point and no further, I just...don't really see much in the way of tools or techniques to help with doing that beyond the nigh-useless "don't be a jerk/don't play with jerks" (again, assuming all DMs can be classified into two hard binary categories, "total jerks" and "never at all even a little tiny bit off"; that such a determination can be made almost instantly by any player; and that nobody ever moves from one category to the other, neither intentionally nor accidentally).

Robertsconley has spent, quite clearly, a lot of effort on trying to work out such techniques, but unfortunately it really does seem like a lot of the end result is "I have to pass my intuitions on to you through direct teaching; they cannot be discussed in any meaningful way" which is...well, it just loops back around to the difficulties with vague handwavy terms and the idea that the only useful techniques are ones which can never be spoken about separately, nor examined afterward, only demonstrated in the moment, fleeting and ineffable, until the acolyte acquires the same intuition seemingly by revelation.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This suggests an interesting construction, where there are actual mental states matching or upholding what is imagined (which I assume must be counted into the causation of A's speech act along with inter alia beliefs, social arrangements and thespian propensities.)

And then there is separately "imaginary stuff" which is the pretend world apart from the players. A simpler construction might deny the existence of that world altogether.

Which is exactly what pemerton has said. The imaginary world simply--flatly--does not exist. Our beliefs and attitudes exist, and those beliefs and attitudes can interact, evolve, and be coherent or incoherent with one or more other beliefs/attitudes. These beliefs/attitudes are causative agents, even though they fail to refer in any way because there simply isn't anything for them to refer to.

The current King of France doesn't exist, because there is no King of France, it hasn't been a monarchy for 150 years (not since the Second French Empire was abolished and replaced by the Third French Republic.) But it is possible for us to have beliefs or attitudes about "the current King of France", and for those beliefs or attitudes to agree or conflict with one another, and for those beliefs or attitudes to be causative agents for future actions on someone's part.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Two things.

1) Total player control over the PCs thoughts and actions =/= the PC having total control over his thoughts and actions. The PC doesn't have total control. The player through his agency does.

And yet a character can become Frightened against the player's will. Specifically because they failed a roll, since that was the big thing that stuck in someone's craw earlier. How is that possible, if the player has total control over the character's thoughts and actions?

More broadly, how can the character ever fail at a task the player desires them to succeed at? If the player has total control over their actions, how is it that not just some actions, but many actions, will simply fail to work?

2) There are some things that no matter who does them, just will not get me angry, even though they get other folks angry. I have total control in some areas. The PC therefore would also have total control over some areas, and the player gets to decide which.

I don't consider this a relevant distinction, given the above question.

 

[Hussar]

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China or the post you responded to?

My campaign world isn't built for any specific group or character. In order to keep my campaign fiction consistent I have notes on various regions that I keep up to date. Part of those notes include how the world responded to what the characters did, sometimes in major ways, sometimes minor.

We discuss what type of campaign overall themes the groups want in session 0 so I can pick an appropriate region. But I'm not going to add orcs to a region that historically hasn't had them.

So I have no idea what you're trying to get at.

Back a bunch of pages, I got told in no uncertain terms that one of the strengths of sandbox games is how it can so easily adopt player input. Players want X in the game, it's easy peasy to add it in and not a problem. That was touted as one of the biggest strengths of sandbox play - how adaptable it is.

Yet, here we have a perfect test case - the player chooses "orc" as a favored enemy. Adding orcs into the setting isn't exactly a huge thing. If you goblinoids, orcs aren't really all that different. Yet, what happens in play? The player's choice is completely ignored. Straight up told, "nope".

This is the problem with all this conversation. The massively shifting goalposts any time anyone brings up anything. Sandboxing is apparently the quantum game, capable of being anything at any time to anyone.