RPGing and imagination: a fundamental point

[Manbearcat]

Just a quick thing.

Whenever I read or say "negotiate" when it comes to TTRPGs, I'm not reading or saying something like "offer > counteroffer > rinse/repeat until we arrive at agreement."

What I'm reading and saying is "continuously traverse the mental and structural landscape (which is what rules and TTRPG play ultimately are) together, formally and informally resolving any contentious states along the path until there is nothing left to traverse."

 

[FrogReaver]

Just a quick thing.

Whenever I read or say "negotiate" when it comes to TTRPGs, I'm not reading or saying something like "offer > counteroffer > rinse/repeat until we arrive at agreement."

What I'm reading and saying is "continuously traverse the mental and structural landscape (which is what rules and TTRPG play ultimately are) together, formally and informally resolving any contentious states along the path until there is nothing left to traverse."

I was curious as to the use of negotiate to mean traversal and so did a bit of research on the word. One of the definitions is definitely related to traversal and it’s a very old use of the word. I’d suggest that meaning is very nearly archaic in modern language, but regardless that use is only odd due to my lack of familiarity with it.

 

[FrogReaver]

That seems like rather contrived example to me as I don't think anything like that is likely to happen in a real game.

I read through that. It does ask good thought provoking questions at the end. Its more of a thought experiment than actual play though.

If examined through the lens of what should have happened, the players had agreed that the dm had authority over the chamberlain and so should have respected that piece assuming they all agreed to a mostly serious game. However once the DM knew the players were aware of the true fiction, he should have went with their PCs actions. They can come across as crazy nut jobs to the NPCs if they want. *Personally, it would have also been fun to do turnabout to them by having NPCs all act similarly about some made up fact about the PCs.

 

[clearstream]

People have to actually perform the acts of imagining. In this way imagining is voluntary, whereas - say - seeing the number on a die, or the position of a piece on a board, is not.

Even very strong promises to do X still require the person who made the promise to actually do X at the point it becomes due.

I recently read about an interesting class of problems of the rough form

A will make a meaningful and non-retractable payment to B at dawn tomorrow provided B intends at midnight today to drink an uncomfortable but not enduringly harmful poison by noon that day.​

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Accordingly B ought to intend to drink the poison. Upon being paid, oughtn't B to change their mind?​

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If B can change their mind, can it really be said that they intended to drink the poison?​

An intuition driven seems to be that even very strong promises can still be overridden at the moment they're due. Particularly when performance requires action by the promiser. One could argue that any promise that can be overridden falls short of "very strong", but it seems quite easy to come up with thought experiments that go against that... or to argue that the term loses any useful meaning.

My take on the thought-experiment is that the payment at dawn subtly introduces new information, changing the game state. That can be seen by supposing a friend of B rushes into the room just before noon, and tells them that A is a dangerous maniac and the poison is really lethal! There's nothing unintuitive about supposing both that B made a very strong promise the night before and that they change their mind due to this new information. In a similar vein, at dawn B learns something new for certain: that they have been paid.

So this is what I suppose happens at the table. The cases we are dealing with readily stray outside our promises. That implies (or at least leaves the door open to) that in cases that don't stray outside our promises, we voluntarily uphold them. (Note that I count removing information - such as forgetfulness - the same as introducing new information.)

 

[clearstream]

Just a quick thing.

Whenever I read or say "negotiate" when it comes to TTRPGs, I'm not reading or saying something like "offer > counteroffer > rinse/repeat until we arrive at agreement."

What I'm reading and saying is "continuously traverse the mental and structural landscape (which is what rules and TTRPG play ultimately are) together, formally and informally resolving any contentious states along the path until there is nothing left to traverse."

Another way to put it could be in terms of submission and acceptance of drafts of the fiction. The group sharing a project of advancing a series of game-states (fiction + system). This leaves open whether it is a matter of "negotiation" to accept system's say upon system (versus system's say upon fiction) but as the traversal will generally pass through fiction and system, it's likely moot.

 

[FrogReaver]

People have to actually perform the acts of imagining. In this way imagining is voluntary, whereas - say - seeing the number on a die, or the position of a piece on a board, is not.

Even in a board game a piece can be placed on the wrong square. Someone must accept that or not. That acceptance is a voluntary act people perform, the same as whether they voluntarily accept to imagine a thing.

 

[FrogReaver]

So this is what I suppose happens at the table. The cases we are dealing with readily stray outside our promises. That implies (or at least leaves the door open to) that in cases that don't stray outside our promises, we voluntarily uphold them. (Note that I count removing information - such as forgetfulness - the same as introducing new information.)

Exactly this. It’s really not that complicated or profound.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

To build one of @Manbearcat's examples: the information provided by an Event roll, in Torchbearer, is first a numerical result, and then second, a bit of text on a table. The GM then has to take that bit of text and incorporate it into their narration of the unfolding situation.

So (to echo Baker's language) the GM makes a suggestion as to what the fiction includes, where (i) the GM's suggestion is prompted and constrained by what they read on the table having rolled the dice to see what they should read, and (ii) the players typically accept the GM's suggestion because the game expressly gives the GM ownership over these elements of the fiction (namely, the events that happen when the PCs camp, enter town, hang out in a tavern, set off in a journey, etc).

I don't understand this obsession about who speaks the information rather than where the information originated. The system provided information that according the rules needs to be incorporated into the shared fiction. Ergo, the system had a say.

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't understand this obsession about who speaks the information rather than where the information originated. The system provided information that according the rules needs to be incorporated into the shared fiction. Ergo, the system had a say.

A possible answer. Imagine for a moment the system said the color blue must be included but nothing more. Ultimately it matters much more how the DM incorporates the color blue into the narration than it does that the system said include the color blue.

I don’t think this is always the case. Some system directives are much more clear and provide much less leeway than others.

But in games that give lots of flexibility to the ‘DM or group’ for consequences of player moves - think pbta or blades in the dark, I think the system leaves so much up to the DM/group it’s much more like the color blue example whereas something like an athletics check in d&d is traditionally really specific in both success and failure.

Part of the problem is in trying to describe both very different styles of games/mechanics with the same language. It just doesn’t seem to adequately apply to both simultaneously.

 

[pemerton]

I’m thinking of blades in the dark. I think there is a true negotiation process imbedded in there. But yea, it’s a stretch to call most d&d play a negotiation IMO. The whole idea that it’s a negotiation just because you can back out of an agreement at any time would make basically everything a negotiation - which to me deprives the concept of negotiation of real meaning. But all this is semantics. If what they mean by negotiation is simply not withdrawing consent I can understand what they are saying, even if I think it’s a really strange way to say it. Most of Bakers concepts seem to go this direction. I think I’m just going to start calling it ‘Bakerian language’.

All that said @clearstream referred to some rare edge cases where what I’d call negotiation may occur in d&d. I think I agree that it can happen - specifically if the agreement is revealed to not be as clear as initially believed. A more common occurrence of this is the DM springing a detail on the player that his PC probably should have noticed or at least had a chance to notice, but doing so after the action declaration. I think I would call what’s happening negotiation.

Here is one simple and in my view reasonably typical example from D&D play:

The GM tells the players that their PCs arrive at a town. One of the PCs says "I want to go and see a metal-worker, to see if I can buy a silver dagger or some silver-tipped arrows to deal with that werewolf that's been tracking us." The GM considers this action declaration, consults their notes which mention "a typical town" but say nothing about the availability of silvered weapons, decides there's a 50-50 chance, makes a roll, which comes up negative, and then tells the player "You find your way to a weaponsmith, but they don't have any silver or silvered weapons on hand." Then the player says, "We've got that sack of silver pieces, right?" and another player nods, and the first player says "Can the weaponsmith do it if I supply the silver", and the GM thinks about this . . .​

Here's another:

The PCs are exploring a dungeon. The GM tells them that suddenly, around the corner in front of them, comes a group of 3 ogres. The PCs are surprised! Then one of the players says "Hey, did you take it account of <this alertness-type feature that I got as a result of levelling up last session>?" The GM replies "Oops, I forgot about that. OK, so the ogres come around the corner but you're not surprised - you hear them coming and have time to ready your weapons and roll for initiative!"​

There are endless variations on the above in D&D, because of all its intricate little components: did you remember my protection effect, my combat buff, the fact that I'm doing fire damage, etc, etc.

Here's another:

The GM tells the players, based on extrapolation from whatever has happened so far, "OK, it's dark and you're all starting to get cold." One of the players says "We light a fire." The GM replies "OK, tell me how. Does anyone have a tinderbox? What are you using for fuel?"​

The GM seeking more information from the players before assenting to their suggestion that a certain sort of craft-y or creation-y outcome is part of the fiction is very, very common in D&D play.

Here's another:

A player says, "My magic-user wants to research a spell that will let us track the location of the <whatever>." And so the GM pulls out the rules chapter on spell research, and the player and GM start to work out what the PC has to do to research this spell.​

Here's another:

The group are resolving a combat. A player says "I attack the Hobgoblin!" The GM replies "How do you do that? You've just finished killing the Bugbear, and the Hobgoblin is on the other side of the room from where the two of you were fighting?" "OK, I move across the room first. Can I do that without being attacked by the giant ape on the way?"​

And another:

The GM tells the players that their PCs come to a dead-end room, with a ceiling about 20' high. The player of the Half-Orc barbarian says "The Halfling gets up on my shoulders and starts tapping the walls as high up as she can to see if they're hollow." The GM asks, "OK, what's your DEX? Is either of you trained in Acrobatics?" And the player responds, "Redgar" - the human fighter with 18 STR and 16 DEX - "joins us, so that Redgar and I are really stable with arms around one another's shoulders and the Halfling stands on both of us." And so the conversation goes on . . .​

That last one is inspired by Gygax's example of play in his DMG.

As these examples illustrate, and as I hope is reinforced by the myriad other possible examples that they bring to mind, coming to agreement on what is happening in the fiction is at the core of D&D game play.