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

[AlViking]

Sometimes people will be too scared to kill someone, sometimes they won't be.

Hmm. If only there was some way to resolve such uncertainties!

Yep. Like the player deciding what makes sense for their character.

 

[zakael19]

@zakael19 I will try to get back to your posts but my initial impression is a thing like clocks might be more used as a tool by a typical living sandbox GM. I have developed dozens of methods for handling things like factions for example but I tend not to formalize everything. I have a box of tools and I tweak them anytime I use them. Sometimes I don’t use them. So for instance a sect trying to take over a city in a campaign, that is a problem I need to figure out how to address. I usually at baseline will deal with it through opposed dice pools with other factions. But I might just decide in some casss. In others I might break it up into increments of successes based on missions and goals they are engaged in. Or I might shift it all to a shake up table. I would say the tools in a given campaign for me are always different

Right, clocks and all that stuff is clearly one set of tools for a designer to drop an entire sandbox-city/setting (I’m running a different FITD that’s a post-collapse sci-fi continent, with the factions split across countries) ready for play in front of a market and try to give a coherent creative vision of a game. Many other techniques available, some which suit other game designs better (obviously a hexcrawl with a system that works on random encounters and reaction rolls needs more tables and such to work).

 

[Faolyn]

These aren't cases of imaginary things having real effects. These are actual things - mental and/or bodily states - having real effects.

As I said, Galadriel, the Millennium Falcon, Conan, dragons, unicorns, superheroes, etc - these things do not have real effects. They can't - because they don't exist!

I'm not sure why you feel the need to repeat my point back to me.

But multiple posters in this thread, when it is suggested to them that the world did it really means the GM made a decision about what happened in the fiction, reject that suggestion.

Presumably, as you say, they don't think that the imaginary thing has real causal power. But there is an extreme reluctance to actually speak about the GM making a decision.

Our mental and physical states are nothing but chemical and electrical actions in the first place. Real things can have real effects on us; imaginary things can have real effects on us. The brain and even the body isn't magically able to tell the difference between real and false. The world would be a very different place if it could.

It is completely pointless to say "Galadriel isn't out there casting magic" because nobody, except possibly someone with a very specific type of mental illness, is claiming that she is. Nobody. You were completely misunderstanding what other people are saying and refusing to admit that.

 

[zakael19]

I think @thefutilist was pointing to how clocks are used in AW front/threat design (and I think DW is similar): as part of their binding prep, the GM establishes how a particular threat will play out - this is described over 6 steps, which are given "clock" settings (3 o'clock, 6 o'clock, then 9, 10. 11 and 12 o'clock). From p 143:

A countdown clock is a reminder to you as MC that your threats have impulse, direction, plans, intentions, the will to sustain action and to respond coherently to others’.​

​

When you create a threat, if you have a vision of its future, give it a countdown clock. You can also add countdown clocks to​

threats you’ve already created.​

​

Around the clock, note some things that’ll happen:​

​

• Before 9:00, that thing’s coming, but preventable. What are the clues? What are the triggers? What are the steps?​

​

• Between 9:00 and 12:00, that thing is inevitable, but there’s still time to brace for impact. What signifies it?​

​

• At 12:00, the threat gets its full, active expression. What is it?​

​

As you play, advance the clocks, each at their own pace, by marking their segments.​

This has to be read together with some principles and moves (pp 115, 120):

Sometimes, disclaim decision-making. In order to play to find out what happens, you’ll need to pass decision-making off sometimes. Whenever something comes up that you’d prefer not to decide by personal whim and will, don’t. The game gives you four key tools you can use to disclaim responsibility . . .​

​

You can (3)** create a countdown**. See the countdown section in the fronts chapter, page 143. Just sketch a quick countdown​

clock. . . . This leaves it in your hands, but gives you a considered and concrete plan, instead of leaving it to your whim. . . .​

​

Make a threat move (from one of your fronts).​

So, when the rules/procedures tell the GM to make a move, and they have to make a move that follows from the fiction, one thing they can do is make a move that advances the threat clock. This brings some vision of the threat's future closer to realisation. And as @thfutilist said, the details are pinned down in advance.

EDIT: pipped to the post by @thefutilist, just upthread.

I didn’t think AW’s designs were particularly germaine to this specific BITD focused question/discussion so I simply said “other PBTAs did this earlier.” BITD extended the idea to a full ready-made high author vision setting, which I think makes it more analogous to the other sandbox mechanisms at play here.

 

[Faolyn]

It’s a cop out . It’s disclaiming decision making after play by blaming it on “the world” rather than disclaiming it during play by relying on dice or some similar procedure.

It’s BS.

Or you're also misunderstanding what people are saying.

This isn't a case of "oh, I can't control what goes on in my world" in the way some people do stupid or horrible things and say "it's what my character would do." Unless I seriously missed something, the people in this thread are talking about trying to make their world react naturally to the actions of the PCs and NPCs in it.

Am I to take it your worlds never change no matter what the PCs or NPCs do?

 

[Maxperson]

Exit light, enter night; take my hand, we're off to Never-Never Land.

But Never-Never Land does not exist any more than the Forgotten Realms do, or the current King of France, or unicorns, or my beloved dragons. We can hold beliefs about them, and those beliefs can matter quite a lot. The beliefs can cause many things. But the lands and kings and beasts themselves have no more existence than the number which is simultaneously greater than seven and less than four.

Wow. Way to ruin a joke.

 

[TwoSix]

It is completely pointless to say "Galadriel isn't out there casting magic" because nobody, except possibly someone with a very specific type of mental illness, is claiming that she is. Nobody. You were completely misunderstanding what other people are saying and refusing to admit that.

Micah said this a few pages back.

If I decide to use a table to determine a world effect, in accordance with guidelines as to when said table should be used, I decided to use the table. But the table made the decision that affects play and the setting.

A table does not make a decision. A person reading the table does.

If you make a setting with a powerful king as an antagonist, the king is not the causal agent of sending assassins after the PCs. The DM is, even if the DM is using impartial mental heuristic or rolling on a random event table to determine what action within the fiction the king will take.

If you make a statement that the king is a causal agent, one of two things is happening.

A) You are confused about the reality of your setting.
B) You are speaking in a metaphor, or in the fictional frame of your setting. (Narrating, or speaking in character, as it were.)

In a discussion of analysis of play, that is confusing and you shouldn't do that. Don't use metaphors. Don't talk about your characters or your setting like they're real. Talk about your tables and the participants at the table, don't discuss from within the fictional frame.

 

[Campbell]

At the table the kayfabe where we do not acknowledge the real world causes of why our characters are acting the way they are or why the setting is arranged the way it is can be useful. It's not particularly useful when trying to discuss various ways the sausage can be made and technique across a range of games that have very different conventions of play because it obscures our ability to meaningful discuss the differences between Vampire - The Masquerade and Vampire - The Requiem if we can only talk about the resulting fiction.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It is not BS. Just a different way of playing and thinking about the game.

To clarify, it’s not the method that’s BS. It’s a GM making decisions and attributing those to “the world” that’s BS.

As I said waaaay back, the GM should own their decisions.

The world doesn’t change because I, the referee, decide it does. It changes because something in the world logically follows from something else. That distinction matters.

I don’t know if it does. I mean… usually more than one outcome is possible and plausible. If you’re just deciding from those options, then you’re deciding.

From your descriptions it’s hard to know what other criteria play a factor in such decisions. Or when you might go to some other procedure to determine the outcome, and what such a procedure might be.

I think @AlViking's idea of things here is probably more the norm for sandboxes. Setting fidelity is usually pretty important. I am not saying if you add orcs because players want them, it suddenly isn't a sandbox. I just think his thinking probably reflects a majority

This is one of the reasons I tend to consider it more GM focused. The prioritization of setting over character.

 

[Maxperson]

I've never heard of a GM running a model. And on its own, imagining isn't modelling.

Ahh. It's only a model if you write it down. Oh, wait.

Modeling is creating simplified representations, such as physical models, diagrams, math, etc. to simulate things or make things easier to visualize, etc. that happen in the real world. In other words, what DMs quite often do .

As best I can tell, the language of simulation/model comes from wargaming. But some wargames do aspire to be simulations, or at least simple models. And they have the correctness conditions that are necessary for something to count as a model or a simulation - for instance, a wargame that models the D-Day landings should, when played and given the appropriate inputs, reliably produce outcomes that reflect what we actually know about how the D-Day landings played out.

And falling damage models(predicts what happens) falling and hitting the ground really hard. D&D sword swings model what happens when a sword hits the body. And on and on. They are really simple models, but they are designed to predict what will happen about what we know of these things.

They are simple models.