Realistic Consequences vs Gameplay

[Maxperson]

People describe the dragon as being armored. People describe the baron as being unstable. Armored has a mechanical expression in the game. Unstable has no such mechanical expression. It could. The DM can simply assign a DC with that in mind.....to convince this nutjob, you need to score X on a Persuasion check or Y on an Intimidate check. Doesn't take much. But it's not something that's already there. If it was, this thread wouldn't exist.

If I describe a dragon as being armored, what armor class is it? You could take a guess, just like you can take a guess that someone unstable has a good chance of taking your head off if you insult him.

Right. Why wouldn't he consider the PCs along those lines? Not that he'd be as wary of them as he would Strahd, but more wary than townsfolk for sure.

How would he know the PCs are more powerful than his soldiers? He knows Strahd. He knows the townsfolk. The PCs are from somewhere else.

Yes, mistakes can happen with any system. My point is that this system lends itself to this particular mistake. It make it more likely to happen.

How does D&D make the DM sloppy with descriptions or the players miss details?

It's not that I'm ignoring it, it's that I think my point is that this is a weak spot for this system. I don't think that the DM needs to do a poor job for their to be confusion. Even great DMs are going to leave something out, or they're going to be more vague than they think they're being, and so on. In most cases, this won't be poor DMing.

Okay, but leaving stuff out applies to every system. It's because those playing it are human and imperfect.

I really don't think that's something precluded by the rules. The DM determines the outcome on a failure, whether it's no progress, or partial success, or success with a setback. I don't think that there's a rule that says "The DM can't say the PC breaks his foot."

Failure = don't succeed. It does not = don't succeed plus setback. There are no rules for critical failures like that. If the DM is breaking feet over simple failed attempts at opening doors, he is stepping beyond what is written.

 

[Libramarian]

Perhaps its the very deliberate lack of neutrality in the orientation of the framing towards the PCs' distinctive characters, and then the way this affects narration of failure, that is key?

That makes sense to me--I do try to be neutral in framing challenges with respect to the PCs created, although I don't think that's totally necessary for OSR play, since char gen as an arena for skilled play is not very important. I would raise an eyebrow if an OSR DM began to include more traps/locked doors in their dungeon in response to a party with multiple thieves, but it wouldn't be a game-breaker.

With respect to the narration of failures, yes I'm definitely neutral. A failed poison save is death, whether it's Snow White or Black Dougal.

 

[FrogReaver]

Two cricket teams are having to decide who fields first. Here's one way: the home side captain decides.

Here's another way: a coin is tossed, and the winner of the toss decides whether that team fields first or bats first.

The second is the way it's actually done. I don't think any cricket players or cricket fans would think that changing to the first way would not make a difference.

That's such a bad comparison I don't even know where to begin pointing out what's wrong with it.

A GM deciding that an action fails automatically is preventing the player from changing the fiction in a way that the player cares about (given s/he declared the action for his/her PC).

The dice deciding an action fails does the same thing.

A GM declining to "say 'yes'" to a declared action and therefore funnelling it into the action resolution mechanics is allowing the dice to determine whether the fiction changes as the player wants it to, or whether it changes in some other way more adverse to the PC.

The first looks like a unilateral decision about the fiction.

It is a unilateral decision. But having a unilateral decision maker about the fiction doesn't necessitate player agency is taken away. As @prabe has been saying when this is done incorrectly then a lack of agency can certainly occur but it's by no means a required feature of such a system.

The second looks like the playing of a game in which the participants are able, via the mechanical frameworks, to change the fiction in various ways.

Just to be clear, "DM Decides" is a mechanical framework. In such a game the mechanism for resolving actions is the DM.

The idea that they are not different in respect of the capacity of various participants to influence the fiction is simply not credible.

When your premises are faulty you end up at incorrect conclusions.

Another way to come at the same point: if the GM gets to decide everything, player input is mere suggestion. It's like a monarch and his/her courtiers and advisors.

The players have a distinguished role of being able to control their characters actions. What your character "attempts to do" is part of the shared fiction. For that reason I don't agree that players are simply making suggestions in that style of game. More importantly though, the GM isn't so much a monarch as he is an elected president with certain duties and obligations. Those duties include determining success or failure when possible and setting a DC when there's too much uncertainty. But he is obligated to do so in a way that makes sense given the genre, other fictional constraints and anything else pertinent to the situation.

In a structure of "say 'yes' or roll the dice" either the players get their way or the issue is rolled for. Rolling (or lottery, or other randomisation) as an unbiased decision procedure, which distributes the possibility of winning the issue over multiple participants and hence respects the agency of all of them, has a long history. Applied repeatedly - as happens in RPGIng - it is a way of integrating various participants' contributions into the unfolding shared project.

And it's easy to see where bad faith play using that methodology can also destroy the agency of the other players and DM in that kind of game. Necessitating a roll with a chance of success for all actions, even those for ruling the world / mass mind control / etc, all tends to destroy agency just as quickly as a bad DM intent on forcing the characters to do something.

But this isn't even true. For instance, in Burning Wheel my character might be unconscious, and hence not in any literal sense taking actions, but I might be able to make a Circles check to see if an acquaintance, having heard of my plight, comes to rescue me.

The issue is one of taking my term at literal face value instead of what I've pretty clearly been stating it means. Character Agency = Agency of the Character = Agency over the character = Agency over the characters actions. You seem to be confusing that with Agency over the fiction concerning the character.

The focus on the character is just a distracting way of trying to approach the actual question, which is can the player meaningfully affect and change the shared fiction?

IMO in terms of comparing and contrasting RPG's it's more meaningful than that.

 

[Manbearcat]

Thanks for the answer!

So, I snipped your post, because I'm pretty much just playing 5E at the moment (open to other games as a player, not interested in investing as much as I'd have to, to introduce a new game as a GM) so obviously this is the part I'm most interested in.

I don't disagree with you that WotC clearly want 5E to be the Adventure Path Edition. I wonder if you think a DM running without a preconceived story is running something degenerate, or merely something that's not prioritized by the game's writers/publishers; possibly running something not entirely to the game's strengths. I mean, I never intentionally prep more than a session ahead; I don't really have preconceived stories; I say stories because I don't know exactly which goal a party will pursue after this one. I don't feel as though I'm using Force to, as you say, "keep the story machine going," but I'm willing to find myself wrong about that.

I wouldn't say degenerate, no, but its certainly not the intent of the design during the playtest (and definitely not the intent of the extremely-curated-for-specific-answer surveys during the playtest).

I have first-hand experience that 5e can be run as a "(very) Poor Man's Dungeon World", it will just fight you because only some of it is amenable to and hacking toward Story Now play (Background Traits, Treating the final Charisma Check in the Social Interacton Conflict mechanics as the DW Parley move, using a static and player-facing spread of DCs for action resolution featuring Success w/ Cost/Complication as the area between Medium and Hard DC) while, holistically, the game is designed to facilitate a very different experience (what I wrote above...which is almost the antithesis of Dungeon World).

 

[FrogReaver]

No, for several reasons:

--- the overarching rules of the game (meta-level) tell us that single-class Fighters cannot cast arcane spells
--- the internal rules of the fiction as presented also tell us that single-class Fighters cannot cast arcane spells
--- NPC Fighters and PC Fighters operate under the same restriction.

Were any of the above not true then there either might be or would be a limitation being imposed, depending on the situation.

I know it's a big deal for you for NPC and PC Fighters to be mechanically identical. I understand that to be about consistency. I don't understand how that impacts agency at all? Maybe you can elaborate?

 

[Lanefan]

I know it's a big deal for you for NPC and PC Fighters to be mechanically identical. I understand that to be about consistency. I don't understand how that impacts agency at all? Maybe you can elaborate?

I'll try.

Short form: if NPC Fighters in a game setting can do thing X but PC Fighters of the same level etc. cannot, in a way my agency in what I'm able to choose to play (in this case a Fighter PC) is impacted because I cannot play a Fighter capable of doing X even though it exists in the setting - or at least that's how I see it. A (maybe?) hypothetical example would be something like NPC-only feats.

It's exactly the same rationale used when I say that if Evil Elves, Humans, etc. exist in the setting then banning Evil PCs impacts my agency in what I'm able to choose to play in that setting, and-or how I choose to play it.

Flipping it around, where PC Fighters can do things that otherwise-equal NPC Fighters cannot, bugs me just as much from a consistency standpoint.

 

[S'mon]

Thanks for the clarification. I do, indeed, think character agency doesn't exist, although I made that case the page before I tagged you, so if you were reading around the tag, you might have missed it. It's pretty simple. Characters are fictional creations. Fiction cannot choose. Choice is a key foundation of agency. Therefore, if you cannot choose, you cannot have agency and character agency doesn't exist.

That said, I like your second paragraph.

The film The Matrix is all about agency. I think you need to be able to buy into the concept of fictional agency to appreciate a lot of fiction.

 

[chaochou]

So, when we talk about “decides” we are using that as shorthand for “who decides what happens next in a piece of fiction”.

Instantly the idea that “the dice decide” is clearly an attempt at semantics, since (as I pointed out) dice can’t establish propositions.

This means that a participant in the game has to establish a proposition. That person has agency in the game.

The mechanic I used as an example used a dice to choose a participant. And that person gets agency.

Posters have attempted to use this to misrepresent this in a number of ways:

By focusing only on a single instance where the suggested dice roll goes against a participant and extrapolating that the losing participant never gets agency. This is clearly false, like claiming the player whose move it isn’t in chess never has agency.

By claiming that suggesting a participant only has to propose a change to the fiction, even when another has complete veto over it, is sufficient to have agency. This is so obviously false it’s laughable. It’s like claiming that toddlers have agency to get what they want by asking their parents.

Only where a game has mechanics to ensure that their proposal can result in specific outcomes they want, and irrespective of whether the GM wants or likes that outcome, does a player have actual agency - not just the fake versions of it so beloved of railroading GMs in this thread.

 

[S'mon]

Only where a game has mechanics to ensure that their proposal can result in specific outcomes they want, and irrespective of whether the GM wants or likes that outcome, does a player have actual agency - not just the fake versions of it so beloved of railroading GMs in this thread.

So board game players have Agency, but traditional RPG players have no agency? Rules-bound Kriegsspiel gives Agency but Free Kriegsspiel does not?

For me this is a degenerate definition of Agency that gives rise to derogatory terms such as Mother May I and Magical Tea Party. It fundamentally misunderstands how trad RPGs work and the GM role as judge and referee.

Edit: of course Railroading is also a degenerate play mode. Forgeist reaction to railroading gave us storygame play. But the better Forgeists don't disparage trad play per se.

 

[S'mon]

If Storygame is too broad a term to encompass stuff like Sorcerer! I suggest those could be called Author Stance RPGs, as opposed to trad RPGs which are Actor Stance RPGs in Edwards' terminology.

I'm not totally happy with Actor Stance as a tern because it discounts or does not comprehend immersion as a play goal. But Author Stance seems fine for the Edwards play mode.