D&D General Story Now, Skilled Play, and Elephants

[Fenris-77]

Definitely. I wonder if posters who feel it does encourage an adversarial stance are thinking of the DM "winning", or maybe just offering an uncompromising challenge?

Uncompromising challenge is the goal IMO, while the other bit is a load of bollocks.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So your saying it's impossible to viably DM (read adjudicate) B/X play in an impartial way? Seriously?!

I'm not saying there is no such thing, at some level, as impartiality. I AM saying that it is not possible to run an ongoing game for any period of time in a completely impartial way, yes.

 

[FrogReaver]

@AbdulAlhazred asserted a disjunction: GM fiat or roll the dice.

He also stipulated certain conditions as underpinning the disjunction: a realistically detailed world, with unconstrained variables, such that solving it as a puzzle is impossible.

If we reduce the number of variables, by reducing the realism of the fiction and stepping up the number of recognisable tropes/conventions/stereotypes, then GM decision-making won't have to obviate player decision-making. This is how Gygaxian skilled play works. It's also how The Green Knight works, although the latter system reaches for a quite different set of tropes, conventions and stereotypes and so sets up the problem-solving in a different way.

I think early D&D leaned heavily upon tropes/conventions/stereotypes along with fairly basic NPC motivations. That helped make it playable from a gygaxian skilled play perspective.

That said I find D&D in the social pillar is often played very differently today. The social pillar tends to be more about roleplaying your character and seeing what comes than trying to skillfully engage in conversation to achieve a goal. I'm not saying there's never a place to engage in skillful conversation, just that such isn't typically the primary method being used in play anymore.

This style of social interaction makes for an almost Story Now approach (without mechanical underpinnings) - where the players express what kind of game they want via their PC actions and the DM accommodates by providing NPCs that interact with the PC's as they are.

 

[pemerton]

What I mean is that some people read the same words, and understand them to mean a different thing. We see that again and again confirmed on these boards, in discussions over what rules are, and what principles are. It's not just that group A are right and group B know that group A are right, but choose to do something different anyway (which of course happens), but also that group A are right - given their reading - and group B are right - given their reading. They are working to differing defaults derived from differing interpretations of the same game-artifacts

I think this is unavoidable.

To explain further:

Compare the amount of human energy that has gone into thinking about the writing, the operationalisation via enforcement and adjudication, etc of law, to the amount that has gone into RPGing. The former is vastly more than the latter: there are academics, and policy wonks, and bureaucrats and other officials, in the thousands and millions, working on the issues. And there are no universal solutions. You can draft your sentencing act with the best of contemporary principles, using the best of contemporary drafting techniques, with the best model sentences from a sentencing commission or whomever else is empowered to produce them; and you will still get differences in sentencing across crimes and context and courts and individual judicial personnel. And that doesn't show that some judges are "activist" or "corrupt" or "bad faith" - it just shows that discretion (together with associated phenomena/practices like interpretation and judgement is a real thing).

So Moldvay Basic can tell us that the GM should be a neutral arbiter, who extrapolates without prejudice from the established fiction. Its provides us with some examples of play, plus a bit of GMing advice, to illustrate the point. There is also a bit of internal contradiction, or at least tension: page B8 tells us that a fall causes 1d6 hp of damage per 10', but an example of fair adjudication on p B60 - while restating that rule - also gives a completely different way (% chance of survival) of dealing with a character who willingly jumps over a cliff hoping to survive by landing in a stream below. (Laws, too, often contain internal tensions which make interpretation hard.) And that's what a group of Moldvay players has to go on!

So we should expect that different RPGers will end up doing different things while sincerely following this advice! Likewise when Moldvay and Gygax, in their rulebooks, say that reward should be commensurate to risk and skill (see eg pp B45 and B60 in Moldvay Basic), what is the relevant measure? Here's the closest that Moldvay comes to answering that question (p B45):

The DM may choose treasures instead of rolling for them randomly, or may choose a result if rolls give too much or too little treasure. The choices should be made carefully, since most of the experience the characters will get will be from treasure (usually 3/4 or more). It will often be easier for the DM to decide how much experience to give out (considering the size and levels of experience in the party) and place the treasures to give this result. However, the monsters should be tough enough to make sure that the characters earn their treasure! . . .

The lairs of most human-like monsters contain at least the number of creatures given as the wilderness "No. Appearing" (the number in parentheses). An encounter with less than a full lair should yield less treasure. On the other hand if 1-4 is the "No. Appearing", even one will have the normal amount of treasure, and no adjustment is necessary.​

The wilderness no. appearing for bandits is 3-30, and their treasure type is A (an average of 17,000 gp worth). So is a group of 10 bandits (AC 6, HD 1, damage by weapon, save as level 1 Thief) with chests holding 5,000 a fair encounter? A 1st level party with a bit of forewarning and a Sleep spell should be able to handle that fairly comfortably, picking up 100 XP for the bandits and 5,000 XP for the treasure. Is that balanced, or Monty Haul? Does it become balanced if we also throw in an encounter with a crab spider (AC 7, HD 2, damage 1d8+ poison (save at +2 or die in 1d4 turns), average treasure around 100 gp)?

I don't think there are definitive answers here. I remember in an early White Dwarf Roger Musson imagines a single kobold guarding a chest with 2,000 gp, and speculates that perhaps no one else was interested in guard duty! And then goes on to say it would be fair game to encounter the rest of the kobolds on the way out of the dungeon. I get the feeling from his writing that he was at the less stingy end than some other GMs of the time, but seems clearly enough to have been a successful GM of classic D&D.

The same thing will happen in other RPGs too. I remember a debate, some years ago now, between @Manbearcat and another poster about whether Manbearcat had gone soft on a particular move in one of his DW games. That sort of difference of approach is to be expected. And whereas in legal adjudication there's at least an argument that it's a problem (because consistency probably is one virtue in adjudication). when it comes to the world of RPGing it doesn't look like a problem at all.

 

[pemerton]

I've read more about the impartiality discussion since my post just upthread. I think most people can read the words and understand them at a certain general/abstract level. But what counts as an instance of impartiality? Or fairness? As I see it, the key point is that there are no unique answers to these questions.

The plus side of this is that every game is different and special. The downside is that humans sometimes make bad calls and play can suffer as a result. One measure of a good GM is that s/he rolls with those bad calls and cleans up the mess fairly quickly!

I should also add, it's not just impartiality that admits of reasonable differences of opinion over what counts. Think again of the the DW example: the boundary between soft and hard moves is not itself clearcut (is smoke on the horizon always a soft move, or can it be hard if we know, from the established fiction, that it will bring the raiders on a sweeping, pillaging raid through the valley?).

I enjoyed reading @Ovinomancer's and @Manbearcat's example of BitD play. Suppose the barmaid was not just a potential innocent bystander but Ovinomancer's PC's sister - is that fair GMing, or pushing too hard? Or instead of an innocent, there's a person in there who is a player in some other political scheme that Ovinomancer's PC is involved in. Or that one of Ovinomancer's PC's colleagues is involved in! - so that now the challenge really becomes one about group loyalties, mediated by Ovinomancer's character having to be the one who - in the fiction - makes the call about exposing this PC to danger.

And obviously the possible alternatives can be multiplied indefinitely.

A further thought: the classic skilled play of Gygax, Moldvay etc purges all sentiment from play - even the sparing of innocents is handled not through sentiment, but by feeding into the alignment mechanics. This helps narrow the parameters both for player decision-making and for GM adjudication of what's fair or not.

Enrich the fiction, and enrich the sorts of things the players are invited to care about in their decision-making, and you better be prepared to change your methodology for adjudication if you don't want your games to be pretty short-lived! (Which even the DL authors realised, however weak their actual revised methodology may look.)

 

[pemerton]

I think early D&D leaned heavily upon tropes/conventions/stereotypes along with fairly basic NPC motivations. That helped make it playable from a gygaxian skilled play perspective.

We're agreed here.

That said I find D&D in the social pillar is often played very differently today. The social pillar tends to be more about roleplaying your character and seeing what comes than trying to skillfully engage in conversation to achieve a goal. I'm not saying there's never a place to engage in skillful conversation, just that such isn't typically the primary method being used in play anymore.

This style of social interaction makes for an almost Story Now approach (without mechanical underpinnings) - where the players express what kind of game they want via their PC actions and the DM accommodates by providing NPCs that interact with the PC's as they are.

I think we're agreed here as far as how people are actually playing the game is concerned.

But we might differ on the analysis. I want to say that, in brute analytical terms, what you're describing is a GMing practice of "saying 'yes'" most of the time, perhaps with the occasional (softer or harder) "no" which the players then work around by having their PCs say something different.

From my perspective, I find this a bit "weak" in the sense that we never get to the heart of conflict and the possibility of a crisis emerging, and going against what the PC (as played by the player) is hoping for.

 

[pemerton]

We're likely to find some clear water between our views here, as for me all TTRPG worlds have a vast number (literally infinite) unconstrained variables even if they are not realistically detailed. It might not be worth our debating that, but just accepting that we have differing views.*


From descriptions of play and watching videos, I can see that DW is revealing in the way it manages and is successful with - roll for each decision. In terms of unconstrained variables, it relocates them (e.g. to 6s or less) and declares boundaries to the decision space (so that it is vast, but less vastly diverse - I recommend reading Borges Library of Babel to grok that).**

Still, one can see that whereas in an example a wand bounced down a shaft, there were a million (again, genuinely infinite) things that could have happened to that wand: the precise outcome wasn't defined and wasn't rolled for. Most choices might have amounted to different flavours of the same thing - e.g. 'I can't use the wand', or, 'I can use the wand if'. But then, there are so many ways that "if" could have gone - if I wait, if I do X, if I pay Y, if I roll and succeed at Z, etc - and the knock-ons from there.... a vast cascade.


* So I am saying that the intent of - "reduce the number of variables, by reducing the realism of the fiction and stepping up the number of recognisable tropes/conventions/stereotypes" - rationally only changes one kind of infinity into another kind of infinity. That is true unless you reduce to a stochastic or deterministic mechanic with properly bounded inputs, functions, and outputs. The second infinity is more useful (see below), but one thing it is absolutely not doing is removing DM-fiat. Only refining and relocating it. That is worth doing, but it is not the same as removing DM-fiat. Rather, we are making statements about better and worse kinds of fiat for given purposes... and there is nothing wrong with that! It is helpful to do.

** Making a space less vastly diverse is extremely valuable. It becomes a helpful subset of infinity (albeit also infinite). Say we have a principle - choose only numbers divisible by 7. There are an infinite number of them, but still fewer than there are numbers overall, and if what we care about is divisibility by 7, then we have done something useful. The picture is not quite so clear with TTRPG principles of course, as we see in debates as to what principles going by the same name include and exclude.


EDITED My view is more open than was captured in my words. Also, removed some text that might not have helped my explanation.

I think we're agreed re DW.

I don't think that classic D&D is different, at the structural level. By reducing the fiction to certain stereotypes and clear tropes, while the decision space remains infinite in a strict sense, it becomes far more tractable. (I think maybe you agree with this point?)

Extrapolating what happens if I throw a rock at the statue is much less challenging than extrapolating what happens if I offer the guard a bribe. Particular if some of the things that happen - eg a small chip to the statue, a puff of dust at the moment of impact - are things we don't care about. We know the impact will make a noise; we can guess based on prior facts about the rock and the statue whether it might fall over (and deciding that via a coin toss or similar probably won't be controversial) and while there are literally infinitely many ways it might fall over (assuming space is infinitely divisible for these purposes) it doesn't matter. It might matter whether or not it bumps the wall as it falls, but that can probably be worked out by measuring things on a map.

Whether one wishes to call this sort of constrained extrapolation "fiat" or not doesn't bother me. I think what's key, in the context of RPGing, is that is far more amenable to player knowledge in advance (at least as far as the key things are concerned); the players can ask questions in advance which the GM will probably answer (like "If it falls will it hit the wall?"); and all this is driven by the fact that - within certain parameters of approximation - there is a definite physical state of affairs that can be extrapolated in fairly predictable ways.

What happens if I shoot the guard with my SMG? lives in much the same space - unless the guard is a cyborg or superhero you probably kill him/her. Whereas what happens if I offer the guard a bribe is not like that. (And here I let @AbdulAlhazred's post upthread take over.)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Given the hundreds of pages of rules disputes, and exchanges on the meaning and application of principles, designers must be much worse at their job than I had formerly supposed

Well, some are and some are not! IMHO the people who wrote Dungeon World were absolutely clear in every way. If you read it, and really do read it so that you can follow what it says at the table (it is plain, but obviously it is still an RPG and a bit complicated) then it should leave few doubts as to the sorts of things to do as either GM or player.

OTOH, even Moldvay's B/X text, though very clear as to procedural matters of dungeon exploration, is not really all that clear at a higher level exactly what the DM is supposed to be about doing. It offers him up as a sort of referee, but then also uses other sorts of descriptions, and ultimately pretty much leaves it up to the participants to figure out what the game, as a game, is really about. As with other versions of classic D&D, it also seems to offer adventure fantasy, but when you play it yields up a somewhat different experience. So, yeah, I have to question some of the expertise there.

I think, like most early RPG texts, the authors have not fully internalized that they are not writing the rules to an Avalon Hill wargame. In such a game the rules simply describe the mechanics, there's no pretense of anything else. Dungeon World concerns itself with how the Role Play and the Game aspect fit together in terms of both process and agenda (what, why, and how). Moldvay doesn't really get into why at all, and only seems to think he needs to address half of how.

 

[clearstream]

I think we're agreed re DW.

I don't think that classic D&D is different, at the structural level. By reducing the fiction to certain stereotypes and clear tropes, while the decision space remains infinite in a strict sense, it becomes far more tractable. (I think maybe you agree with this point?)

Yes, I do. Making infinite decision spaces far more tractable is a good way to put it. I was mulling to myself this morning that maybe we have principled-fiat and unprincipled-fiat. It's funny that the second term sounds suspect - like malicious-fiat or degenerate-fiat - when all it might mean is fiat exercised without bounding the decision space up front.

I like that principled-fiat does not have to mean by-my-principles or by-your-principles, only by some-principles. Have some principles and your decisions during play are more tractable. It becomes pragmatic to talk about which principles are more effective, which contain difficulties, what results given principles are likely to deliver, and so forth. It's easy to see how that discussion pays off.

Whether one wishes to call this sort of constrained extrapolation "fiat" or not doesn't bother me. I think what's key, in the context of RPGing, is that is far more amenable to player knowledge in advance (at least as far as the key things are concerned); the players can ask questions in advance which the GM will probably answer (like "If it falls will it hit the wall?"); and all this is driven by the fact that - within certain parameters of approximation - there is a definite physical state of affairs that can be extrapolated in fairly predictable ways.

Well, what one wants to happen is extrapolation* from the principles. There probably wasn't a trend of wands bouncing down shafts to extrapolate from, but there should have been a trend of complications that made it predictable the wand would do something inconveniencing.

Fiat may be best seen as a multi-dimensional construct. I can constrain a dimension so as to be able to extrapolate along it, even while being unable to extrapolate along others. With the wand, the constrained dimension might have been convenience or availability: it was going to become less available (including I think, unavailable). Unconstrained was the consequent fictional positioning. It might have shimmered out of existence for a period, it might have shorted and sparked for a period, it might (and did) relocate in the imagined volume of space, it might have ended up in another creature's hands, the owner might have experienced some ill-effects or block on use... we don't know what that will be, but we know for sure that it will be inconvenient (and only that, rather than terminal).

Each principle ought to be giving us one or a few dimensions along which we can fairly extrapolate. My "dimensions" topology might be replaced by "questions" language - so that principles are helping us extrapolate the answers to questions that the game system is telling us we ought to answer.

One can quibble that a bit. If we arrange a history of decisions along an axis of extrapolation, we can predict that different observers will have differing strengths of agreement with each decision counting as a fair extrapolation. An example might be something you wrote further up - what counts as an instance of impartiality?



*I'm happy to accept "extrapolate" as a way to differentiate between principled and unprincipled fiat. If that seems useful to you?

 

[clearstream]

OTOH, even Moldvay's B/X text, though very clear as to procedural matters of dungeon exploration, is not really all that clear at a higher level exactly what the DM is supposed to be about doing. It offers him up as a sort of referee, but then also uses other sorts of descriptions, and ultimately pretty much leaves it up to the participants to figure out what the game, as a game, is really about. As with other versions of classic D&D, it also seems to offer adventure fantasy, but when you play it yields up a somewhat different experience. So, yeah, I have to question some of the expertise there.

There is also the matter of what is being attempted, and of what is known at the time it is being attempted. DW built upon AW, B/X, and whatever cultural and academic exploration of RPG that the authors were aware of in between. We have seen that with each wave of innovation, the earliest generations are working often in pockets, with scanty technical, academic or cultural support. Subsequent generations eventually reach a point where they have lived with the innovation for their entire lives, and they enjoy wide support and powerful cross-pollination.

Chances are those born with RPG will have had far greater opportunity to develop skill with it. So if we made the comparison equitable by birthing K/L way back then, I don't believe we can predict that they would have fared better than Moldvay. They might not have published a single line.

It makes me wonder what the next innovations in RPG will be? I am going with - AI designer-DMs, who will build the game-system and world on the fly, while they are DMing you. They will be more expert than all of us.