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

[AnotherGuy]

I’m concerned with both sets of goals.

Of course. I didn't mean you do not but I wanted to reflect a similarity between the two games as opposed to always stressing on the differences, which DO exist.

Read what I actually wrote before asking a loaded question. Every system has creative goals and priorities. I place plausibility first. Other systems place their priorities first before plausibility.

I did read, I DID note that first.
But I have to be honest, I would be very surprised if players of the other RPGs did not ensure that plausibility and coherency did not exist in their games.

I don’t find clocks to be a useful aid for tracking what’s going on in my campaigns. Due to the ripple effects of interconnected events from different groups, I rely on notes and a combined timeline of projected developments.

Sure, we are juggling a lot of setting content (this includes NPCs for me) and the mechanics with clocks are not necessarily a good fit for tracking changes in all that and as you say ripple effects of interconnected events.
I find clocks useful on the meta-level and if one wants to provide a player-facing mechanic and leave things to chance which you alluded to in the post I replied to, not about clocks specifically but about other issues. i.e. roll when possible before using discretion.

What you're missing is that very little of what happens during my sessions is procedural in the sense you're describing. The session unfolds from first-person roleplay. There’s no need for an "intent and task" mechanic like in Burning Wheel. The players show intent by roleplaying their characters. Tasks arise naturally from what they describe their characters doing, including combat.

I wasn't touching on the procedures and techniques. I was attempting to highlight the similarities.

This post describes an example.

To expand on it further:

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The group arrives at Gold Keep.
They crest the ridge and see the town about a half mile away. I describe the scene.

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As they get closer, they can see buildings like the inn and shops, so I add labels to the map.

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Sometimes they split up to do different things, I handle this round-robin style and can manage up to three or four subgroups before it bogs things down.

In this case, they all head to the castle. At the gate, Erdan (an elven merchant-adventurer) asks to meet the Constable, Sir Jerome Blackhawk. The group is polite and looks respectable aside from the tribal priest from the steppes. No roll needed, they're let into the Great Hall.

Five minutes later in-game, the Chancellor arrives. I roleplay him in first person. He asks the party their business. Erdan reveals he’s an elf, which carries high status in some human realms, and explains his concerns about hill giant activity. I call for a persuasion check, but only to see if he rolls a natural 1. He doesn't, so they’re shown to Sir Jerome’s study.

Spoiler: The Rule of One

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In-character, they lay out a proposal to deal with the giants. It aligns with the NPC’s goals, so no roll needed. Sir Jerome agrees. They’re offered supplies, decline, rest overnight, and head out in the morning. All of this handled in first person roleplaying.

They scout, find Yonk’s lair, kill a warg patrol, hide the bodies, then decide to approach the Elves of Silverdim to request help. The elves refuse, they’re refugees rebuilding from the fall of Silverwood and have no desire to provoke the giants. They also pay Yonk’s fee themselves for peace.

Still, the players learn a lot: local politics, hill giant culture, and elven attitudes, all from first person roleplaying and interacting with NPCs.

They return to Gold Keep. Josh didn’t mention in his post that the party chose not to involve Gold Keep’s military due to high likely casualties. Instead, they plan a small-team disruption campaign. With an assassin, monk, rogue-style merchant, and tribal druid/cleric, they feel confident.

The next game day, they leave Gold Keep. I roll encounters like always. Then the events Josh described unfold.

At that point, the party realizes their actions will ripple far beyond Gold Keep, so they wrap up and continue on to Castle Westguard, following their original mission.

I have appreciated your roleplaying style, the level of detail you have placed in your setting as well as the maps you keep providing. It is impressive.
I run my sandbox differently to yours in that I have a number official adventure paths and modules that run concurrently, and while I'm juggling that I lean into providing character goals/desires and I inject often enough player facing mechanics where I feel it would provide the intuitive knowledge the PCs would have when making decisions. When it comes to the setting, ACT 2 of our campaign is in Forgotten Realms, my information is sourced from published content, setting and homebrew - but not nearly on the level of scrutiny you provide, ours PCs are also 15th level so the setting changes rapidly as you may imagine.

You say using the term leadership is “needless.” I disagree. It’s not just a label. Refereeing a long-running campaign where the world is persistent and consequences matter takes actual leadership. I’m not talking about ego or table dominance. I mean the responsibility to maintain continuity, ensure fairness, and uphold the internal logic of the setting. When players know their actions have real consequences, because the world doesn’t bend to spotlight them, they trust the game more. That trust has to be earned, and that’s part of the referee’s leadership.

I understand that, I think one of the differences is that you predominantly maintain that sense of order at the table and in the fiction. From what I understand Pemerton shares some of those responsibilities with players at his table. And yes that is one of the differences, but that is not to say his table would be absent of fairness, internal logic etc, while I think consequences are a result of GM moves (failures on dice).
It is well to mention that his players are also accustomed to maintaining that sense of fairness and internal logic of the setting or I doubt that table would survive.

The idea that the difference between my playstyle and Pemerton’s is just a matter of timing misses the point. It flattens a structural difference into a superficial one. In my campaigns, the world is in motion. It doesn’t sit idle waiting for a dramatic beat. I’m not listening for what the players might want to see happen and then slotting it in. I’m adjudicating how a world with its own agendas and timelines reacts to what the players choose to do. That’s not just a difference in pacing. That’s a difference in how player agency functions.

I think the timing difference/pacing was in relation to the wants/desires/beliefs of the characters.
As for an evolving setting, I do not want to speak too much on that, like I said my focus was on similaries not the procedural differences.
I suspect clocks and framing is how some of the changes may be addressed in their campaigns, which then one may argue does GM decides (or as you put it adjudicating) occur within framing? Now that is a question to ask.

As for player chatter during sessions: sure, I’ve drawn inspiration from it. But I don’t treat that as a cue to give them what they want. If it aligns with what’s already in motion, great. If it doesn’t, the world doesn’t change to accommodate it. That’s part of the discipline of running a Living World.

Is that something you believe @pemerton does? Change the world to accommodate player chatter?

You’re not just building forward, you’re maintaining consistency backward.

I do not see how a table could function if there was no backward consistency.
Again, is that something you believe @pemerton's table does, ignore backward consistency?

What I'm trying to show you is that these principles are not unique.

We likely are juggling with more content and thus we decide/adjudicate on more of them without the use of dice.
But backward consistency, internal consistency, plausibility, coherency, realism, consequentialism - call what you wish is/are not unique to Living World, World in Motion, Sandbox Play etc.

The differences are is how they materialise, how they are adjudicated. The procedures we use.

There is other stuff that is different to, between the games but I'm not speaking to that right now.
My original post to you was merely about the similarities which exist.

And yes, I improvise. But your framing ignores how I actually run things and tries to pull everything back toward a framework you’re more comfortable with. My improvisation is bounded by world logic, not driven by theme, character arcs, or narrative tension. I’m not asking myself “What would make a compelling story here?” or “What will challenge the character emotionally?” I’m asking, “What happens next based on everything that came before?” That’s not a stylistic difference. That’s a procedural one.
Wrapping this up, I’m disappointed in this kind of response. If you conflated how Powered by the Apocalypse procedures, of which Moves are a part, with how Burning Wheel handles Intent and Task, the reaction would be annoyance, maybe even anger, and the conversation wouldn’t go anywhere. This is no different.

I did not refer to procedures, I just do not buy PbtA other RPG games run with storylines where inconsistency is permitted. I do not know how anyone can imagine such games exist.
If I'm wrong on that assumption prove to me, wheresover in this mammoth of a thread from all the examples he has provided where you have witnessed inconsistency or some breakdown of world logic. It should be easy if that were the case.

I’ve said, other said, repeatedly, that Pemerton’s techniques and philosophy make sense given what he values in RPGs. But he cannot conceive of a universe where my Living World sandbox, and the versions shared by others here, are equally valid approaches grounded in different assumptions. And now you’re defending that dismissiveness, that quiet gatekeeping, that subtle effort to diminish how we play.

I'm not diminishing how we play.
I value GM decides/adjudicates and hidden backstory.
There is enjoyment for me in setting prep.
Adjusting the D&D rules for a sense of realism happens at my table.
Our table also has fun incorporating some indie player facing mechanics or leaving decisions for the table to decide as opposed to the GM. And it is interesting to watch the players start to do the work for you to maintain setting coherency. I can give you examples if you wish, but this post is already long, so I could do it in a future post.

What doesn't pass the sniff test for me is thinking that others run nonsensical settings and storylines. I have read posts from @pemerton and @Manbearcat and there is nothing I can point to that lacked the plausibility and internal consistency.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This kind of rhetorical narrowing is exactly what we’ve seen before, from Edwards, Baker, and others who’ve made it clear that only one kind of play counts in their eyes. It’s frustrating to see that dynamic repeated here.

I do not follow or read Baker and all the others, only really what I have read from this site. And there are likely posters who thinks parts (or even most) of my games are railroad-y, that is ok. It is the nature of his forum.

I'm just content that I have personally found a good medium for what works for me at my table.
Our table enjoys exploration but I also want dramatic beats, as you call them, to occur frequently so I will incorporate procedures to ensure that happens. I do not want ignore or even slow burn character development/tension, that is not satisfying to me and I know that my changes work for my table, including for our so-called hack-n-slash player.

 

[SableWyvern]

OK, my list of questions about the Hardholder was a pretty superficial description in the sense that it didn't delve into the rest of the process and how it all hangs together: The player chose to use the hardholder playbook, a playbook which specifically casts the character as at least an organizer, if not outright leader of a community or group, the inhabitants of the hardhold, a refuge in the chaos of Apocalypse World. The hardholder player will describe this place to at least some extent, and the rest will be discovered in play.

In your example of Dark Sun and a village, etc. you chose to create a village, and give it some circumstances which YOU were interested in. Do you see the difference right off here?

Referring back to Blades, which is what I'm familiar with, I chose to run the game and set it in Doskvol because I was interested in that. I don't see how that's any different than choosing to run a game set in Dark Sun and have a village of escaped slaves. Blades clearly shows me that "Play to Find Out" does not necessarily mean, "shared world creation."

[Edit to add: The definition I quoted from Blades also explicitly states that the GM's decisions are included in the process of playing to find out, so it doesn't seem correct to call out the existence of GM decisions as being contrary to the philosophy.]

Now, it may well be that the GM, at some point, makes a move, or reveals a threat, or a clock tick brings a threat to enact some problem for the hardhold, lack of water in my example. This is putting pressure on the character because, presumably, they care about their community, or at least some parts of it. In your example, you also create a threat, but it isn't against anything that the players seem to have chosen to value. Instead presumably they will do something most likely because it is in their interests. D&D certainly doesn't foreground any kind of character motives or interests.

But notice the nature of my questions, they weren't just simple questions, they were also escalating, and focusing on the character. I was imagining this whole process. The PC is doing whatever, she's probably engaged in other conflicts, keeping the peace maybe, gathering supplies, whatever she does. Water is presented as an issue, in order to threaten the holding. First the player has to decide, will the character take the water needed by others? Maybe, maybe not. This is likely to bring some other conflicts too, the Angel may not be cool with taking the Sand People's water. Maybe it will turn the population against her! In any case, tough decisions will be made.

But AW is a game where things escalate. The world isn't OK. Maybe she decides to share the water and now some people are pissed and she's got to decide, will I bust heads? Will I resort to violence? Finally, the situation gets crazy, the character's sister somehow gets involved, will she kill her, or whatever the situation is? Play to find out.

It is a very different kind of structure of play. As I said in the first post, I have never seen trad play do this. I have seen some dramatic trad play, but it was always more focused on something the GM planned out, like your village, with a plot attached to it.

Now, talking about how events tend to escalate and spiral out of control is absolutely touching on what makes Blades unique and interesting to me. I agree completely that "it is a very different kind of structure of play" and, if you are going to include escalation of events being nearly inevitable as part of the definition of "Playing to Find Out," then I also have to agree it goes well beyond simply referring traditional definition of emergent play.

However, at no point when reading Blades did I see anything that suggested to me that if events in the game are not escalating out of control, then you're not meeting the definition of "Playing to Find Out." I don't see any reason not to think other elements of the game (downtime, lulls in play, a moment of friendly interplay with nothing really at stake, etc) aren't also covered by the general philosophy espoused by play to find out. If your definition does include that distinction and doesn't include such things, then so be it. I realise there may be respected game design philosophers in the PbtA community who have made that distinction and consider it fundamental to the definition, but that much narrower definition doesn't seem exist in the text of Blades in the Dark or, if it does, I completely missed it.

 

[pemerton]

Because a vision doesn't have to have a reason. Faithfully adhering to what has gone before is a reason.

Huh? What is fidelity to what has gone before - which of course is something that the GM authored - but adhering to a vision?

 

[pemerton]

OK, let me get this clear before I confuse myself further:

Step 1: the character declares she's going to commit murder, and maybe gives some details as to how, with what, etc.
Step 2: the GM calls for a Steel check, which the PC fails.
Step 3: the PC hesitates a moment before attacking and ultimately stands down - the actual (attempt to) murder never occurs.
Step 4: ???

"Let it ride" would seem to imply step 4 cannot be to follow through with the murder or even to attempt to do so as she's been shown to not have the Steel for it.

And step 3 - the way I interpret this to work, anyway - tells me the Steel check stops the process in its tracks before the attempt (i.e. the in-fiction physical use of a weapon to try to murder the victim) occurs. The dagger is raised but it never strikes; and it's the strike of the dagger that it the actual attempt to murder.

A failed Steel test causes hesitation. From Revised p 121-2:

Steel is an attribute that represents the character's nerves. It is tested when the character is startled or shocked. The results of the test then tell us whether the character flinches, or whether he steels his nerves and carries on.

When a Steel test is failed, the player loses control of the character momentarily - just as the character loses control of his faculties. The player chooses how the character loses it, but after that the character is out of action for a few in-game seconds as he freaks out. . . .

When a player fails to get a number of successes equal to his hesitation, he's failed the Steel test. When this happens, the character stops what he is doing and loses it for a moment - for as many heartbeats as the margin of failure.​

The player has four default options for hesitation; various traits can add additional options. Once the hesitation has ended, the player regains control of their PC, and the character can act.

Let It Ride says (p 32) that "A player shall test once against an obstacle and shall not roll again until conditions legitimately and
drastically change. Neither GM nor player can call for a retest unless those conditions change. . . . Nor can a player retest a failed roll simply because he failed." So if a player fails a Steel test, their character hesitates and their is no re-roll. But once the character has recovered from their hesitation, they do not to test again.

In the particular episode involving Aedhros and Alicia, Aedhros's hesitation gave Alicia sufficient time to cast a Persuasion spell. As per the Revised Character Burner (p 181),

a sorcerer may offer a 'suggestion' to his target. It must be a minor request or suggestion and seemingly normal or mundane; the sorcerer may not command his target to do anything. If the spell is successfully cast, then the victim must do as the sorcerer suggests. He must attempt to complete the request in the time allotted by the duration. After that time, the suggestion will lose importance, and the victim will move on.​

The duration is "sustained" - analogous to "concentration" in D&D. So when Alicia collapsed from overtaxing herself by casting, the spell ended. So Aedhros was magically persuaded only for a moment. But I (playing Aedhros) decided that the moment for murder had passed:

Aedhros opened the strongbox and took the cash. We agreed that no check was required; and given his Belief that he can tolerate Alicia's company only because she's broken and poor, and given that it aggravates his Spite to suffer her incompetence in fainting, he kept all the money for himself. He then carried out the unconscious Alicia (again, no check required). He also took the innkeeper's boots, being sick of going about barefoot. But he will continue to wear his tattered clothes.

 

[AlViking]

Who is "tearing down", or saying that things don't work?

I mean, here's a post from upthread:
Where you justify interrogating me because you think that my RPGing is nonsensical.

And here's another post from upthread:
Presumably you don't see this characterisation as "meaningless" of RPGing that I enjoy as tearing down.

So likewise, my attempts to understand how the GM of a "living world" sandbox makes decisions, and my suggestions that many of these "living world" sandboxes seem to be rather GM-driven, such that I would tend to find them railroad-y, is not "tearing down". It's just me sharing my thoughts and perspective. No amount of metaphorical description of the imagined world as a causally active thing is likely to change my thoughts.

Why does it matter if you like some style of play that I do not? I made quite clear that I was talking about my reaction to a particular game mechanic in response to someone repeatedly posting that I would "learn something" when my character failed a test. I wouldn't learn anything other than the fact that I was playing a game that required such tests. That doesn't make the mechanic bad, the only thing it means is that the mechanic doesn't work for me.

But if that mechanic works for you? Great! Have fun with it. But just like I will never sit down to watch a football game in my spare time, a game you happen to enjoy just wouldn't work for me. That's not a bad thing to acknowledge. But I always couch my statements in terms of my personal experience and perspective.

But you? Even on a post you accuse others of tearing down your game when they have done nothing but express what their reaction would be? You have to tell people that the method they use to run their games is crap when they've explained time and again what they mean.

 

[pemerton]

As for an evolving setting, I do not want to speak too much on that, like I said my focus was on similaries not the procedural differences.
I suspect clocks and framing is how some of the changes may be addressed in their campaigns

I don't use clocks in BW or TB2e. I probably should have in Classic Traveller - but I used a more "gut feel" approach about how the threat from the Imperium was progressing.

In BW, the evolution of the setting is a matter of consequences and framing, as you say. I remember introducing the wedding of the Gynarch of Hardby as an element of general background/context while the PCs rested for some months in Jobe's ruined tower in the Abor-Alz; the PCs heard of it from travelling merchants (who, from memory, came into play as a result of a Circles test). I'd have to go back to my note to check what happened that made it be called off, though I think it had something to do with Jobe's conflict with Jabal.

In TB2e, as well as the BW-type ways of evolving the setting, there are also random events: when the PCs make camp, when they enter town, when they drink in taverns, and when they travel. I've already given some examples in this thread:

*Telemere drank in a tavern in the Dwarf Hold. The events table said that a friend bursts in with an incredible tale; so I had Korvin (a PC whose player was absent that session) burst into the tavern, telling of the pirates' pending assault on the Moathouse;

*When the PCs returned to the Moathouse, at one point they waited until nightfall. I took this as an opportunity to narrate the light they could see outside, a lantern at the prow of the pirate vessel sailing down the river. The pending pirate attack then influenced their dealings with Lareth.

*When the PCs returned to Nulb, the random town event produced the result that all the accommodations were full of pirates (so PCs had to sleep on the streets).

*When the PCs next returned to Nulb, the random town event produced the result that the town was completely overrun by pirates. So the PCs couldn't stay there, but instead paid a pirate captain to sail them to Wintershiven.​

The random events in TB2e tend to make the setting a more prominent aspect of play than it is in BW. This is a deliberate design feature, intended to emulate classic D&D. It does make TB2e less player-driven than BW - the events throw up these setting-based intrusions that are rolled on the table, and then interpreted and applied by the GM. As GM, I connect them back to the players' concerns/priorities as best I can, but they do shift the momentum of play back the GM's way even if the players haven't failed a roll.

 

[TwoSix]

Imagine a land filled with warring nations, until some powerful figure unites them into a single empire with them as the Emperor.

Now imagine a group of PCs who, in the midst of doing PC things, kill the Emperor. And their spouse. And their heirs. And their goatee'd vizier, quite possibly only because he has a goatee. They also make a big announcement to the public, so the public knows what a good deed the PCs just did. (Look: PCs are not always that bright.) They adopt his dog, though--they're not monsters--and name it Snuffles Throat-Ripper. They may or may not try to actually take over the throne, but it's just as likely they just go on to the next adventure.

Realistically, the land should quickly go back into warring nations, right? At the very least, some of them will want to take advantage of the power vacuum the PCs left behind (or the PC's own lack of experience in leading an empire, should they try it). There will be ripple effects in adjoining nations. People that the empire had oppressed may rise up in the chaos and try to take back what is theirs, while people who had prospered because of the empire's protection and patronage are likely to suffer without it. Etc., etc. Even if the emperor and their family got raised from the dead, there would be at least some changes.

This, IME, is what people generally mean about the world reacting on its own without the GM. They aren't claiming the world actually exists outside of their heads or on paper. Nobody actually believes that their fantasy world is real, unless, as I said, they have a very specific type of mental illness. Nobody is truly trying to say "I have no control over my world." (Except for those occasional creeps who use excuse in order to include noxious elements like "it's realistic that women are second-class citizens who get raped a lot!")

What the GMs are saying is that there will be at least a somewhat logical chain of events that should naturally happen after a major event happens, and that not following that chain of events wouldn't work. Like, in the empire in the aforementioned bout of murderhoboism. If the GM decided that, afterwards, the entire empire immediately becomes a corpocracy simply because the GM thinks that would be cool to turn it into a fantasy cyberpunk thing and magically hack crystal balls, at the very least skepitcal eyebrows would be pointed in that GM's direction, because that doesn't follow from the previous events.

That seems to me to be the logical progression of the background narrative for pretty every system and GM style out there.

Nothing there to dispute.

 

[zakael19]

I have conversations in the first person but not exclusively. I describe what the characters doing, their facial expressions and so on. I don't do voices per say but I do modulate my own voice a bit. I sometimes describe their inner thoughts (which is a big no for a lot of the more immersion orientated people), almost like early comic books where you can read the characters self talk in the panels (although I do that in third person).

Yeah, over the last year-ish I've been trying to understand why some novels give me a much better mental image of the back and forth then others, and trying to incorporate their descriptive techniques into how I portray NPCs. Bouncing between 1st and 3rd to speak / describe movements or gestures and little bits of the person you'd be trying very hard to take in IRL has really helped me. GMing, I notice a huge difference in my ability to imagine the situation between my players who do something similar ("you see her face break out in a big grin as she steps forward to wrap you in a hug" vs "I hug you and say"), and those who just speak words in first person.

Given exclusively online play on my end, we really need to lean into the vivid descriptions; and honestly it's way more imagination facilitating then I ever got with a bunch of people speaking dialogue at each other with in person play. Adding in bits of the inner life (you just know from his whiny voice as he says that he's full of crap), much less going full Read a Person questions really gives a full picture for me.

Love to improve!

 

[AlViking]

Yeah, I find the idea that plate tectonics and wind currents are important for designing a fantasy setting a bit odd.

I want my campaign world to feel like it's based on a real world with magic layered on top. What I find odd? That you give a hoot about how other people design their worlds.

 

[AlViking]

But, I guarantee that if you had two plausible outcomes, one of which you think the players will enjoy playing out and one that they wouldn't enjoy, or you think will be boring or not personally interesting to play through, virtually every single time, you will choose the former and not the latter.

Claims of "world logic" fall flat in the face of actual play.

That's missing the point. This isn't about what options the players have to choose from on what they will pursue next, I will do my best to make those choices interesting and engaging. If they end up in a situation that's boring we'll likely just narrate it possibly with some back-and-forth for a few minutes. The characters may waste months of time in-world but we're not going to waste game time.

It also means that some super-fun scenarios may never occur. That's fine because there will always be other options and opportunities.