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

[pemerton]

Or look at Google street-view. That Australians drive on the left is an independently veifiable fact.

Are you an expert on satellite imaging? Or do you rely on authorities to assure you that Google street view is an accurate representation?

 

[AnotherGuy]

It's not just that the stakes have been set, but more so that the lockpicking attempt has nothing to do with the cook. Being discretely different events means that there should be different rolls to determine each.

Another thing is the level of realism, which may or may not be an issue to any particular traditional DM. For me it is. In order for the cook to be there in the dead of night, the cook would have to have woken up in the middle of the night for some reason, decided to get up rather than try to go back to sleep, then have that wake-up happen to be on the night that the PC is trying to pick the lock, and lastly have the timing be during the brief period where the PC is picking the lock.

There's probably not even a 1% chance of that happening, let alone as high as your chart above indicates, which is well higher than that. Even a 1 in 20 chance of that happening when you pick the lock is too high. Depending on how many people live in the house, there might be a 1 in 20 chance of someone being awake in the middle of the night, but in a house that can afford a chef, there would likely be multiple floors or a very large spread out single floor and the location of that individual could be quite distant from the door.

Ofc, you may have spotted a light beforehand coming from the kitchen or heard a sound, perhaps it is not the cook but a stable boy in the darkness looking to steal a morsel of cheese, a guard dog sleeping in the pantry, cat that gets surprised and knocks a glass in her attempt to escape etc.
There is plenty of fiction. And when I referred to the fiction and mixed fiction in my post I was referring to the cook or any other injected fiction caused by the die roll (11-15)

 

[pemerton]

So if the established fiction has it that it's about 2 a.m., the house is dark and quiet, the PCs' prior casing of the place has shown there to be no watchdogs or pets, the weather is benign so no chance of sudden downpours or thunder etc., and the Thief blows his pick-locks roll on trying to get into the kitchen, what next?

I don't know, you tell me?

The games that I play have momentum, events in motion, trajectories of threat and promise.

I've posted many examples upthread: Aedhros, having failed to kidnap a victim, wanders the streets at night hoping to calm himself and perhaps be recognised by the other Elves as one of them, but instead is harassed by guards; Jobe and Tru-leigh get lost in the catacombs, and find themselves looking up through a grille only to find their rival, whom they had drugged, recovered and looking down at them before racing off to beat them to Jabal's tower; etc, etc.

If I ever have a situation like the one above, and post about it, I'll try and remember to @ you.

 

[pemerton]

Consider--the reason people aren't responding to your example despite you quoting it 4 times is because it isn't clear what the example is doing.

It is illustrating fail forward.

Failed attempt at kidnap => word on the street of a knife-wielding assailant.

Failed Sing to try and restore my sense of self => harassed by a guard.

Failed Circles hoping that an important Elf will turn up to help me => another guard turns up.

This is what fail forward looks like in play.

It would help me if you made your point with a simple toy example, like the screaming cook, or like John Harper did in his blog post.

The whole point is that there are no toy examples. Fail forward, as a technique, assumes characters with motivations and wants, fictional situations laden with threats and promise, etc.

That's what John Harper is illustrating in his examples. I assume they're inadequate somehow, but I don't know in what way.

Hard moves? Setup moves? or both?

Following from the fiction is a foundational principle for RPGing (outside of the absurdist, I guess). Because Apocalypse World is a complete set of rules, it states it as a principle that the GM is to have regard to in making their moves, whether soft or hard.

How closely do they have to align with the fiction? Can they create new NPCs that previously didn't exist?

What do you mean by previously didn't exist? If you mean that it is established that a room is empty, then it wouldn't follow from the fiction to narrate it as occupied.

But there is no expectation in AW or BW play that every individual who might figure in play has to be documented ahead of time. To me, that has been a pretty typical features of RPGing since I first read Classic Traveller in the late 70s - that game has rules for random encounters with people, who don't have to be taken from already-authored lists of the populace. And the classic D&D rules, which have random encounters with people as core elements of game play, are similar in this respect (it probably makes more sense to say that Traveller is similar to D&D, but I encountered Traveller first).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I am sorry, your math intuition is a bit off. I think the issue become clearer if you turn it arround: Do you care about your chances of succeeding halving? How about your chances of succeeding being reduced by less than 1%? A doubling of 1 in 1000 to 2 in 1000 feels much less significant to most than a doubling from 50% to 100%.

Also I think these math details is insignificant to the larger point you try to make, and I guess this exchange unintentionally proved my point that the D1000 example might be bad due to the possibility that it might distract from this larger point..

All I can say is I don't think so. If you're going to want to represent things that are as rare as we're talking about, throwing them into 1 in 400 is no substitute, and I don't think most people would actually think it was.

 

[FrogReaver]

There are two things here:

(1) If someone has failed, generally the GM is going to make what in AW parlance would be called a hard move. Some implicit or perhaps expressly flagged consequence is brought home. Burning Wheel is probably a bit less clear-cut here than AW, in part because it is based around scenes and stakes for resolution (AW is not in the same way), and in part because it has extremely high rates of failed tests (by D&D standards, and setting aside low level human thieves in classic versions of the game).

Overall I like this post. Let me try to bring up a few of the things people just aren't getting.

1. I think there is some misunderstanding about what you mean by implicit. For us, the idea of kitchen in the house is implicit and that attempting to break into the house at an unspecified time has an implicit risk of a cook being present. Maybe that's not exactly what you mean by implicit? Or maybe time of day in these games is necessarily more codified than we imagine?

2. Part of what's happening in our discussion is that the scene is subtly being changed midstream as we walk through this example, from 'house at unspecified time' to 'house at 2am'. I think we all agree that a cook in the kitchen at 2am would not be implicit, which would seem to align with what you are trying to say above. I think this answers the cook in the kitchen at 2am critique very well as it just wouldn't be something that will occur at least without a prior soft move establishing the cooks presence.

Though this still leaves open the scenario of
A) a soft move previously established the presence of a cook in the kitchen at 2am
B) and possibly others

(2) A general principle in AW is that moves have to follow from the fiction. Burning Wheel doesn't state this (and doesn't use the terminology of moves); it talks about scenes, but again takes as given that the elements in scenes are implicit if not express. (That's part of the explanation of why a player can make a check to see if there is a chamber pot or jug in the sick room, but not a check to see if it contains the Imperial Throne.)

The notion being that chamber pots and jugs are typical to sick rooms and thus implicit to them. Similar to the way a cook is implicit to a kitchen but not exactly the same.

But the last part of this about a player making a check to see if those things are in the room, I really want to walk through that as it aligns almost perfectly with my Scenario A above.

Scenario A (expanded) Assuming our premise is breaking in at 2am, the player checks the house to ensure no one is awake (or maybe that's not a valid player move in these games?). The player fails the roll such that a soft move is called (scenario A) and this establishes the presences of the cook in the kitchen. What the player does next would have the possibility of triggering a hard move involving the cook screaming for help. To make this more concrete let's say the player threatens the cook, 'if you scream i'll kill you', which triggers a hard move where on failure the cook look at his rather large kitchen knife and says just try it while he yells for Help.

But there's a couple of things with this

1a - It's fairly clear that instantiating the cook screaming for help over a soft move then hard due to the where and when being somewhat implausible otherwise clearly makes for better gameplay doing it over just a hard move in this scenario. But, is handling that over soft then hard move actually changing the conceptual critique any? I'm not really sure it is.

1b - What is the game incentive for the player checking for anyone awake in the house? It seems like the fewer precautionary moves you make the fewer potential obstacles will get put in your path? I presume not making those precautionary moves will typically influence either your failure rate or strength of your effect on some future moves, but it's not clear whether that's necessarily the case and whether the player is informed of those potentialities beforehand. This is cutting to both an 'actually informed' critique and a 'gamification' critique.

Where is your mooted cook coming from? Your mooted kitchen? The lack of expectation of the door being passed through?

Implicit...

 

[FrogReaver]

Why don't you or someone else run that scenario in the system of your choice and tell us how it goes.

So you can tell us we did it wrong the moment what we do deviates from what you do? This isn't just idle speculation, it's happened before, so Nah.

You're the resident expert here on those games and I trust you know exactly how the mechanics work. But you're not the expert on interpreting what those mechanics mean and their implications. I think that subtle nuance doesn't always come across to you.

 

[pemerton]

What is the game incentive for the player checking for anyone awake in the house? It seems like the fewer precautionary moves you make the fewer potential obstacles will get put in your path?

The game incentive for checking if anyone is awake in the house is the same as the game incentive for declaring any other action - which can vary from player to player, moment to moment, and of course system to system.

Perhaps the player thinks it's what their character would do. Perhaps, slipping into author rather than actor stance, the player thinks that making this check at this time will support some PC advancement goal. Or the player may engage in a different bit of author stance reasoning - that making their move in this field of endeavour rather than this other one might improve their chance to take some control of how things unfold.

These things can overlap, of course. Why did Aedhros wander up into the better parts of the city? Because he has his various connections to the Elves, and he has an instinct, when his mind wanders, to quietly sing the Elven lays. And by acting on his instinct and causing trouble (in the instance I posted most recently, he was accosted by a guard), I earn a Fate point.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It seems to me that character death from a cause like this any more than twice a year might feel rather too much! On that basis I'd agree with @Thomas Shey. One response would be to suppose the group roll far less often for this sort of thing, e.g. if it's once an hour of play the observed incidences per year decline dramatically.

It also matters how often what you're looking for is even going to get checked for. If you've got a game that only makes the check that is liable to trigger the low-incident event one in five sessions, whether it happens one in 2000 or one in 400 may well be invisible (which begs the question of why you even feel the need to do the check but that's neither here nor there). If, to use the example it hand, you do a lot of climbing checks so it'll happen every other session and happen multiple times a lot of the times it happens at all, that 400 is a lot more likely to be noticeable (and if you have anyone who's done a lot of climbing, feel pretty weird). As noted in other contexts there are dynamics to repeated checks that increases abnormal probabilities in a way that just looking at the individual probabilities doesn't necessarily spell out to people not looking at the full picture.

(It should be noted that even my reference to D1000s probably makes some of these things too frequent because of this To be fair to Micah, some of what he's said suggests he's really thinking more of injury--which is a lot more frequent in reality than death--than "two bad rolls and you die"--but that's not what someone using a simpleminded version of "fumble means fall" in this situation or some equivalents that can come up with jumping or swimming can produce).

 

[pemerton]

You're the resident expert here on those games and I trust you know exactly how the mechanics work. But you're not the expert on interpreting what those mechanics mean and their implications. I think that subtle nuance doesn't always come across to you.

I don't know what you're getting at here.

I don't see why I'm obliged to run a game about screaming cooks to satisfy you and other posters. I've posted actual examples from actual play. If you don't want to talk about them, and instead want to worry about screaming cooks, that's your prerogative. But that doesn't impose any obligations on me.