D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[pemerton]

I figured "artha" was incidental to my understanding when you've used it before, but now it seems important. Could you explain what that is?

It's the BW label for Fate, Persona and Deeds points.

 

[niklinna]

It's the BW label for Fate, Persona and Deeds points.

Well I'm familiar with Fate and Persona from Torchbearer. They are points you get to spend in various ways to improve your skill tests and such. I guess Deeds are similar, maybe for different types of actions or with different prompts.

 

[pemerton]

That reinforces my point. I can find interpretations of a game text that suit (or arise from) my prior determination that nothing in 5e can be read in a way that supports principled, constrained DMing. That shows how interpretations generally come after principles, not before.

<snip>

What I am discussing is more like a skill challenge.

I've spelled out an actual process of play for Classic Traveller, based on a straightforward application of the game rules. I've said what the player says, what the GM is expected to say in response, what setting and framing is necessary (the PC is in a city or starport where contact with the underworld is possible). In your example of the referee setting an impossible target number, the player knows that they don't know where the dirt is. So we still have full transparency to the player.

Can you actually provide an example of the sort of play of 5e you are describing, where a conflict is framed and resolved without the GM having to make a decision about the relationship between task success, the fiction (both revealed and unrevealed) and the stakes?

 

[pemerton]

Well I'm familiar with Fate and Persona from Torchbearer. They are points you get to spend in various ways to improve your skill tests and such. I guess Deeds are similar, maybe for different types of actions or with different prompts.

Fate and Persona are similar in BW to Torchbearer. Deeds is awarded for going beyond the narrow concerns of the PC and dramatically impacting the big picture. It allows doubling the skill/attribute/stat dice, or rerolling all traitors.

EDTI: @niklinna - in BW, "traitors" = "wyrms" in Torchbearer.

 

[FrogReaver]

Here is the move description for Seduce/Manipuate:

When you try to seduce or manipulate someone, tell them what you want and roll+hot.​

​

For NPCs: on a hit, they ask you to promise something first, and do it if you promise. On a 10+, whether you keep your promise is up to you, later. On a 7–9, they need some concrete assurance right now.​

​

For PCs: on a 10+, both. On a 7–9, choose 1:​

• if they do it, they mark experience​

• if they refuse, it’s acting under fire​

What they do then is up to them.​

If the check is a success, we learn that the PC was seductive enough. (If it fails is another matter. Within the soft/hard move structure, and the guiding principles and agenda, the GM has quite a degree of leeway to narrate failure.)

I could lean harder on your distinction, too: seductive enough for what? The most natural answer is to achieve what they wanted!

IMO. Hot isn't measuring your characters seductiveness in the fictional world because being seductive in the fictional world requires consideration for the particular NPC's resistance to seduction and that's no where accounted for in the resolution mechanics. You have the same chance of seducing a priest as you do a guy in the strip club.

Have you played Apocalypse World, or read the rulebook? I think you are looking for differences in the least promising place, namely, PC build. Whereas the differentiation that - as best I can tell from your posts - you are interested in is found in the principles that engage the action resolution mechanics ("if you do it, you do it") and the rules for when the GM makes a soft or a hard move, which include a conspicuous lack of appeal to pre-established or unrevealed backstory.

Does it matter if I've played or read it? I trust that those I am speaking with are giving me the pertinent details in order to engage with their example (I didn't start talking about AW on my own afterall). If some pertinent detail was left out and that is mistakenly shaping my perception, then please add it in.

The seduce/manipulate skill doesn't establish that any NPC has any information. I've posted it for you above: it obliges the NPC to give you what you want in exchange for a promise.

From the AW rulebook, p 109:

Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say​

what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else: everything​

about the world, and what everyone in the whole damned world says and does except the players’ characters.​

Am I correct that the resolution of the Hot roll determines that said NPC all along had the information you wanted? If so then in Frogreaver jargon that means 'the seduce skill established the NPC had the information.

That's how a player, via their PC, might learn whether or not a NPC knows where the dirt is. It doesn't give the player any content authority, though. It obliges the GM to use their content authority in a particular way.

For what I care about, that's a distinction without a difference. If a player move can result in the GM being obligated to use their content authority in a particular way then that's exactly the kind of detail I care about. It may not seem important to you, but it's immensely important to me.

You seem to be using "process/sim" to describe a technique, not a creative agenda.

I think I agree here.

Even on that interpretation of the phrase, seduce/manipulate is not process/sim because if it fails, the narration of failure need not follow the in-fiction causal logic of the attempt to seduce or manipulate. From p 116 - "Whenever someone turns and looks to you [the GM] to say something, always say what the principles demand." And the principles don't demand you to track in-fiction causality; rather, they require you to author in-fiction causality. This is addressed on pp 110-11:

Make your move, but misdirect. Of course the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s fiction instead. Maybe your move is to separate them, for instance; never say “you missed your roll, so you two get separated.” Instead, maybe say “you try to grab his gun” — this was the PC’s move — “but he kicks you down. While they’re stomping on you, they drag Damson away.” The effect’s the same, they’re separated, but you’ve cannily misrepresented the cause. Make like it’s the game’s fiction that chooses your move for you, and so correspondingly always choose a move that the game’s fiction makes possible.​

​

Make your move, but never speak its name. Maybe your move is to separate them, but you should never just say that. Instead, say how Foster’s thugs drags one of them off, and Foster invites the other to eat lunch with her. Maybe your move is to announce future badness, but for god sake never say the words “future badness.” Instead, say how this morning, filthy, stinking black smoke is rising from somewhere in the car yard, and I wonder what’s brewing over there?​

​

These two principles are cause and effect. The truth is that you’ve chosen a move and made it. Pretend, though, that there’s a fictional cause; pretend that it has a fictional effect.​

​

Together, the purpose of these two principles is to create an illusion for the players, not to hide your intentions from them. Certainly never to hide your NPCs’ actions, or developments in the characters’ world, from the players’ characters! No; always say what honesty demands. When it comes to what’s happening to and around the players’ characters, always be as honest as you​

can be.​

Sounds almost exactly like what I've been saying.

Suppose I'm interacting with one of Dremmer's underlings, and I read them - How could I get you to spill the beans on Dremmer? - and so I learn their price, and then that's what I offer when I manipulate them, and so they do what I ask: they tell me where I can find the dirt on Dremmer. It's in a safe in such-and-such a place in the hardhold. So I sneak in, acting under fire, and I hit my roll and open the safe. And I look to the GM, and the GM has to make a move, in accordance with the principles. I haven't failed my roll to act under fire, and I haven't handed the GM an opportunity on a silver platter, so they're not allowed to make a hard move and tell me the dirt's not there!

Sure. I'm not saying that's wrong or bad. I'm just saying the moves being made are not moves within the fictional world as the process for resolving said moves takes no account of the situation/NPC's in the fictional world and 2) a successful result ensure far more than any in ficitonal world move by the character could have ensured.

But I'm looking at them, so they have to make a soft move. There are a lot of options there, from the sound of voices approach, to a dog barking, to there being something else with the dirt I didn't expect (say, a photo - Where did Dremmer - or whoever took it - get a polaroid from?! - of Dremmer in bed with my partner). The GM will be acting on the principles and making a move that they think follows honesty from the established fiction.

But to reiterate: they can't make a hard move if I make my check and don't hand them an opportunity on a silver platter, so they can't say the dirt's not there.

That's how Apocalypse World does conflict resolution: not via funky PC building, and not via funky allocations of authority, but via very careful rules about what the GM is allowed, or required, to say and when.

Here you describe the DM being obligated to have the dirt be there based on a successful player move. That's exactly one kind of content authority that is important to me to know about.

 

[pemerton]

Perhaps it has appeared that am I talking from the perspective of a GM?

Not sure. I've played DW but not GMed it. I've neither played nor GMed AW but have read it pretty closely and drawn it on heavily to help me GM Classic Traveller. I would like to GM it one day.

It may not be a factor in the mechanics, but there's a fiction being spun too, which usually involves character motivations. I'm not going to show up to the table and roll a die to decide every action my character takes. I don't have to reel off my rationale, either as player or character, for my actions, but I do have some fictional position in terms of the situation. That's all I'm saying.

Fair enough!

My agenda in my reply to you is this: I think there is a tendency for some posters to glom all "story now" RPGing together, and to assume that what makes play "story now" is to give players lots of content authority, with that authority being driven by player intentions/desires for their PCs.

But in AW the allocations of authority are completely traditional except for a very small number of cases (eg the Battlebabe move that lets the player identify someone who will die in a fight). Yet it reliably delivers "story now" play. And this is because of the design of the moves, plus the role of custom moves, plus the principles that govern what the GM says when. Those aspects of the design are where the genius is to be found. (In that sense it's a much more technically brilliant game than, say, Prince Valiant or Burning Wheel.)

 

[pemerton]

I have been in games where the GM had a player other than the one spotlighted in the scene do the framing. It could go wrong, but I haven't seen it do so yet. Players in this particular type of game are usually happy to turn the screws on fellow players!

Right. My friend and I have played BW like this: a PC each, and each is responsible for framing the scenes and/or establishing the consequences for the other. It works no probs!

 

[niklinna]

My agenda in my reply to you is this: I think there is a tendency for some posters to glom all "story now" RPGing together, and to assume that what makes play "story now" is to give players lots of content authority, with that authority being driven by player intentions/desires for their PCs.

Yeah that is definitely not where I was coming from with my prior statements. Strictly about having the fiction in somebody's head motivate their actions & mechanical resolutions. Although I do have experience with the other too.

 

[pemerton]

I do find Apocalypse World a bit exhausting in that way.

It's definitely not for everyone. It's not for me all the time. After running a session of Apocalypse World I'm more exhausted than I am after leg day.

I'm not 100% sure what a "leg day" is but I'm guessing it's an exercise thing?

As @Campbell already knows, my coping mechanism in Burning Wheel GMing is sentimentality on my part. When my friend GMs he is ruthless! In real life he's a finance wizard, so maybe that explains it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

While they'd land in that category, they're not alone. You can have people who really deeply care about story, but only in context (in other words, the deep roots of the kinds of stories they see as emerging are based in the setting information (including any genre conceits in strong-genre settings, but not only limited to those). Which doesn't mean you can't get stories that port over to vastly different settings (I've mentioned The Magnificent Seven and The Seven Samurai before) but some stories only make sense in some settings, and some people care a great deal about that who aren't simulationists in really either of the usages.




I'm not sure that has to be done late in the day or reactively though. Honestly, if you're going to use D&D monsters in an a setting you're going to have to do some sort of considerations anyway, and that's still going to be dependent, in part, on setting integrity (if there's a level ten monster outside the gate, how is the gate even there? Or the town). The arrow of cause-and-effect can point either way there.

Not really, it could be some undead that happens to have a lair nearby, who knows? There's a 100 reasons why something doesn't attack a town. I'm just saying, that never happens. I mean, its effectively canonical for sandboxes. Anyway, I think the overall point isn't in contention. Its a game, always primarily a game, and that's fine. I think where I started on this line was about what any of that tells us about agenda, which is subservient to the overall nature of the RPG as a game, with roleplaying, etc.