Recurring silly comment about Apocalypse World and similar RPGs

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah I do understand where you are coming from. What's weird for me is that it seems incoherent with current styles of play. Realism, or at least a consistency that everyone can reason about, like D&D falling damage, is needed in classic 'FK-like' Gygaxian skilled play. Otherwise devising clever plans and reasoning from fiction are impossible. However, the problem was, it tells lousy stories. This has led to trad play, etc. in which those considerations are at best secondary and really become essentially color. All of us long ago crossed that bridge!

It's like this discussion of 'plausible dungeons'. It's almost insane, no dungeon is even faintly plausible and thus any crazy thing makes as much sense as anything else. So I can't really think that plausibility is really the issue.

You are making the assumption that current styles have inherent value over older ones. I do not hold to that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Then why are people telling me about how focused the rules of DW are on dungeon-crawling, if that's not true?

Just speaking for myself, we're not a monolith. I've gamed with @Manbearcat but we haven't played DW together, specifically. I can understand his position on it, I think the game works okay for general D&D-esque adventure gaming. It was written as a dungeon crawler and adjacent kinds of stuff similar to B/X. I don't think it's inflexible, but the moves are written in terms of that kind of play.

Let's say you wanted to run a game with pirates on the Spanish Main. You can certainly start at DW. Adding ship moves and more thematic playbooks probably will produce a better result, just like adding similar sorts of rules to D&D and pirate focused classes etc. will make it better.

 

[Faolyn]

But, it does have the word "dungeon" in its title! Therefore ergo facto(tum) it must be focused around dungeons exclusively.

I had to admit, I was disappointed that Dungeon World was not literally about a World of Dungeons, and it led me to making a setting I haven't used yet, the "Demiplane of Dungeon" (the notes live mostly in my head rather than in any written form, sadly). A living, slowly-shifting dungeon home to numerous sentient beings who are just doing their best to get by in a world that doesn't have a lot of natural food resources, while at the same time not falling to the "full of evil raiders"/"every man for himself" motifs you get in a lot of similar (often post-apocalypse) resource-poor settings.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't see the fiction as arbitrary. You do. That's the difference.

I don't want to endlessly poke at it, but I'm baffled. I drew up plenty of dungeons in my day, but I feel like it would be silly to imagine that whenever I drew up a level/area I was thinking "this slanted passage is logically needed here for engineering reasons" or something like that. It's there to screw up the player's map and dupe them into taking bigger risks than they intended. No other justification is needed and anything else is fundamentally post hoc.

Even if I imagine that it's a drainage channel I am still inventing the need for that and if I do so, the supposition that ground water required it is still made up. It's turtles all the way down!

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't want to endlessly poke at it, but I'm baffled. I drew up plenty of dungeons in my day, but I feel like it would be silly to imagine that whenever I drew up a level/area I was thinking "this slanted passage is logically needed here for engineering reasons" or something like that. It's there to screw up the player's map and dupe them into taking bigger risks than they intended. No other justification is needed and anything else is fundamentally post hoc.

Even if I imagine that it's a drainage channel I am still inventing the need for that and if I do so, the supposition that ground water required it is still made up. It's turtles all the way down!

No other justification is needed for play, true, but I enjoy the result quite a bit more if it's there, and would rather it be there given the option.

 

[Lanefan]

I believe this is covered by considering the intended chain of justification. It's supposed to be

Fiction justifies action justifies rule invocation justifies further fiction​

Presupposing the rule comes into play when it hasn't been justified by the fiction leads to this

Fiction justifies action justifies rule invocation justifies further fiction​

The way I read the post I was responding to, it came across more like the fiction had to bend to suit the rules; where this seems to indicate the rules have to bend to suit the fiction.

Which is it?

Why did we invoke the rule, when that wasn't justified by our fiction? The answer connects with my observation that there are in practice three specificities of resolution

It exactly fits a rule​

​

It fits within the scope of a rule​

​

It doesn't fit a rule​

​

Our games have means for handling each specificity. If it fits the rule, do what the rule says. If it fits within the scope of a rule, do something like what that rule says. If it doesn't fit a rule, turn to your means of judging.

The question arises when the rules want to say one thing yet the fiction wants to say another: which one has to give way?

Take a high-level character falling off a cliff (or out of a skyship) in D&D. The fiction - as expressed by real-world common sense - wants to say that character will 99.9+% likely die on landing, while the rules - as expressed by the number of hit points she has vs the damage the rules say the fall will do to her - want to say she'll brush herself off and walk away. Do you go with the rule, or go with the fiction?

 

[hawkeyefan]

GURPS players don't spend a lot of time championing their preferences onto the larger gaming community. They just play GURPS. This thread (and the other one @pemerton created recently) are specifically preemptive strikes against perceived attacks of misrepresentation against narrative games by the trad community. He wasn't responding to any particular post. He was making an active complaint. Then he made the same complaint regarding a more specific (but very similar in principle) game.

Actually, they were made in response to a post in the "Worst RPG" thread where the specific comments he's arguing against were made. It's not a "preemptive strike against perceived attacks", it was a response to specific criticisms. And these criticisms come up frequently. It's happened in this thread. Along with several other mischaracterizations... like the one that the fiction produced by PbtA and similar games is somehow less plausible than that created by trad games.

 

[Lanefan]

You want to know why I don't engage with you guys? This is it. I don't have some super secret black hat that I'm hiding. I'm not a villain who is twirling my mustachio and petting my cat in the dark. But whether you guys intend it or not, your orientation to these conversations look like you're try to find my super secret lair where I'm wearing my black hat and petting my cat and twirling my mustachio in the dark.

Can someone explain, then, why I'm hearing very soft purring as I read this?

You are not going to find my super secret lair nor my black hat nor my cat nor my mustachio-twirling.

Well, bang goes that adventure hook. Plan B, on deck, please!

 

[hawkeyefan]

The way I read the post I was responding to, it came across more like the fiction had to bend to suit the rules; where this seems to indicate the rules have to bend to suit the fiction.

Which is it?

I tend to think that it all starts with the fiction. Whatever Move is being made in PbtA games (at least the ones I've played and am familiar with) is being made because of some fictional reason. Nothing starts with the rules. We have the conversation about what's happening, and then at some point, something happens that triggers a Move.

Once the Move is triggered, IT is what determines the outcome, at least in the broad sense. The result of the roll for the Move, or whatever other resolution system it invokes, is what tells us the outcome, either Success, Failure, or some combination of the two. The GM then takes that broad category and interprets it in a way that is still bound by the fiction.

The question arises when the rules want to say one thing yet the fiction wants to say another: which one has to give way?

Take a high-level character falling off a cliff (or out of a skyship) in D&D. The fiction - as expressed by real-world common sense - wants to say that character will 99.9+% likely die on landing, while the rules - as expressed by the number of hit points she has vs the damage the rules say the fall will do to her - want to say she'll brush herself off and walk away. Do you go with the rule, or go with the fiction?

Why not do both and say that this was the .0001% chance that someone would survive such a fall?

I joke in the sense that this isn't how I'd handle it, but I think it's a relevant answer. Ideally, the game rules wouldn't allow for such an absurdity.

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah I do understand where you are coming from. What's weird for me is that it seems incoherent with current styles of play. Realism, or at least a consistency that everyone can reason about, like D&D falling damage, is needed in classic 'FK-like' Gygaxian skilled play. Otherwise devising clever plans and reasoning from fiction are impossible. However, the problem was, it tells lousy stories.

On the last clause, the 40 years I've spent at this would lead me to a different opinion.

This has led to trad play, etc. in which those considerations are at best secondary and really become essentially color. All of us long ago crossed that bridge!

If by "trad play" (I'm still not quite clear on what that series of terms are supposed to represent) you mean WotC-era D&D or Paizo PF1 style adventure path more-or-less-hard-rails play, some of us decided to blow that bridge up rather then cross it.

Or, if instead you mean over-the-top cinematic 4e-5e style play where realism doesn't even get to sit in the back seat, that too isn't a bridge worth crossing IMO.

It's like this discussion of 'plausible dungeons'. It's almost insane, no dungeon is even faintly plausible and thus any crazy thing makes as much sense as anything else. So I can't really think that plausibility is really the issue.

I posted an example just upthread of a dungeon complex that at first glance today would look implausible and not a little dysfunctional but on knowing its history it all makes sense and, given the assumed setting, is quite plausible.