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

[Thomas Shey]

Since a flashback can't change what's been revealed so far (you can't go back and kill the person you're talking to), does that make flashbacks harder to do* because you greatly limit what kinds of failure are possible? (The character obviously didn't get detained for half a day or beaten or maybe even get recognized). Would a failure be something like something caused the target to notice the gun had been messed with, for example?


* Edit: I mean, "make them harder to run than the things happening in the present"

This is what I'm curious about too, since I have no practical experience with the approach.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, I mean, there are people who design and deploy actual traps too. I certainly wouldn't argue that nobody in the world exists who might qualify. They are just not sitting at a D&D table, or at VERY few of them, and the way D&D and traps are structured, they would have to be the DM for it to matter. In fact I'd think being a trapsmith and playing old school D&D as a player would be a highly frustrating experience! lol.

I'm glad you qualified that, as I used to play with someone who designed security systems (as in, the layout and triggering, not the technological component) for a living. Let's just say playing Shadowrun with him was enlightening.

Oh, I entirely agree, it is one of (along with insufficient general knowledge being at the table) a primary reason.

Its also why I argue a set of rules for commonly handled situations are a virtue even if they aren't entirely accurate, as long as they don't completely break expectations (though you can always have the situation where expectations are so far from reality, that paradoxically a realistic set of rules about something will do that) is better than having a GM or even the collective group decision handle it--because there may be no common agreement about how some things actually work, and that can make making decisions almost impossible. With a set of rules, you at least know more or less how the damned situation will be resolved most of the time.

Eh, not really. I mean, I haven't played Cypher, but I read through it pretty carefully. Its a very calculated and deliberate design who's basic premise is a conscious and systematic rejection of Ron Edwards et al. In tone and even in some ways in a structural and mechanical sense, it parallels PbtA and similar types of games very closely in what it addresses, and then utterly commits itself to a GM-centered fiction pure task-oriented system ala games like Traveller (and I mean Traveller as classically portrayed by most people who play it, not @pemerton). I guess what I would say is it is VERY analogous to Top Secret S.I. or FASERIP games that have a fortune mechanic. There's a meta-currency, which is not a feature of Traveller, but in terms of resolution and how and why it works, Cypher System is right out of the mid-1970s.

I think its a deeper rabbit-hole than I want to go down, but I'll say a number of things about how it handles success and failure in terms of the necessity of burning attribute points to do it are very far away away from virtually any older game I'm familiar with; the closest you get was TFT's essentially having mages burn hit points to cast spells, and I don't think its a coincidence that was not only not imitated by others, it wasn't even carried through to its descendent GURPS. So I think you're underestimating what an odd offshoot it is in some important ways.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think its a deeper rabbit-hole than I want to go down, but I'll say a number of things about how it handles success and failure in terms of the necessity of burning attribute points to do it are very far away away from virtually any older game I'm familiar with; the closest you get was TFT's essentially having mages burn hit points to cast spells, and I don't think its a coincidence that was not only not imitated by others, it wasn't even carried through to its descendent GURPS. So I think you're underestimating what an odd offshoot it is in some important ways.

Well, the fact that it uses attribute points is not THAT typical, but Traveller for example uses ability scores AS hit points, and you can certainly do things like take an action which will surely result in damage. I recall when a PC decided to transfer from one ship to another THROUGH THE VACUUM OF SPACE and that's exactly how we handled, basically it was the 'Dave Bowman Maneuver', so he takes some damage for being exposed to vacuum for 5-10 seconds. MORE typically damage is either a consequence of failure, or a result of someone else's success in hitting you, but the idea is still pretty much there in Traveller.

TFT is a good example as well, and there have been some other magic systems that are similar. CoC SAN is often used in the same way. In fact it is used in EXACTLY the same way when casting spells (as they universally have a mandatory SAN loss when used). BRP in general also has POW, which is both an ability score AND a pool of points that various flavors of it use as a resource (sometimes it gets renamed in some versions). I believe that also comes from RQ.

I mean, OK, maybe Cypher leans a bit more heavily into that specific mechanic than most, but it is still a very classic skill/attribute/trait kind of system at its core.

 

[Malmuria]

I'm curious about this, since I've never actually played a game using this technique; what happens if you fail in a way that should have had ripple effects in the time frame between when you trigger the flashback and when it had actually occured? Say, you do something that would have logically made some of the opposition change behavior you've already taken advantage of? Does the GM just avoid having anything that wouldn't change things until after the flashback trigger point?

Well it's difficult to respond in the abstract. Maybe @Manbearcat has thoughts on this dynamic. The first thing I would say is that for every roll, the GM sets the position the character is in and the possible effect. So a failure could mean the PC has a worse position or a more limited effect. At a more fluffy level, I present flashbacks cinematically. So we think about, ok, if this was a movie, and it had a flashback where a character tried to do a thing and failed, what would the consequences be? I think the author is very comfortable with metagaming and backing out of being "in character" to have a conversation at the table as to how this would play out.

Here is John Harper, author of the game, on position and difficulty:

FWIW, for my 5e players, the flashbacks weren't the thing that was most difficult to grok. More difficult is that Blades is a very mechancis/procedures-heavy game. So whereas in 5e there's a very loose way the GM says "make a this check, make a that check," in Blades you have to think a lot more about what's going on and how a roll will affect the fiction going forward. The other thing they found difficult is to not be super cautious and to conserve stress. In fact, flashbacks didn't initially come up that often because the players didn't want to spend any stress.

 

[Manbearcat]

Well it's difficult to respond in the abstract. Maybe @Manbearcat has thoughts on this dynamic. The first thing I would say is that for every roll, the GM sets the position the character is in and the possible effect. So a failure could mean the PC has a worse position or a more limited effect. At a more fluffy level, I present flashbacks cinematically. So we think about, ok, if this was a movie, and it had a flashback where a character tried to do a thing and failed, what would the consequences be? I think the author is very comfortable with metagaming and backing out of being "in character" to have a conversation at the table as to how this would play out.

Here is John Harper, author of the game, on position and difficulty:

FWIW, for my 5e players, the flashbacks weren't the thing that was most difficult to grok. More difficult is that Blades is a very mechancis/procedures-heavy game. So whereas in 5e there's a very loose way the GM says "make a this check, make a that check," in Blades you have to think a lot more about what's going on and how a roll will affect the fiction going forward. The other thing they found difficult is to not be super cautious and to conserve stress. In fact, flashbacks didn't initially come up that often because the players didn't want to spend any stress.

Really busy so time-limited reply:

* If an Action Roll (not Coin or “yes” or Fortune Roll to determine outcome), Position/Effect on Flashback should be handled just like normal.

* If Consequence, then handle in a way that impacts play as interestingly as possible (which may include immediacy - intraScore) but doesn’t violate the established fiction and gamestate rules for Flashbacks. Best ways to do that are:

- Heat.

- Extra Coin for Acquired Asset.

- Compromise related Friend/Contact or Cohort that isn’t in the Score.

- Loadout box/es (more burdensome to have the thing than hoped for).

- Faction Loss.

- Start a Faction/Setting Clock and tick it (and move it forward during Downtime).

- Start a related Clock that impacts the Score and tick it (it can’t go off because max ticks would be 3 so it’s a looming threat but hasn’t changed the gamestate yet).

 

[Malmuria]

Oh yeah, clocks! That's the most obvious one.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, the fact that it uses attribute points is not THAT typical, but Traveller for example uses ability scores AS hit points, and you can certainly do things like take an action which will surely result in damage. I recall when a PC decided to transfer from one ship to another THROUGH THE VACUUM OF SPACE and that's exactly how we handled, basically it was the 'Dave Bowman Maneuver', so he takes some damage for being exposed to vacuum for 5-10 seconds. MORE typically damage is either a consequence of failure, or a result of someone else's success in hitting you, but the idea is still pretty much there in Traveller.

I think there's a non-trivial difference between "this emergency situation requires me to take some damage to succeed" and "virtually any meaningful success in the game does".

TFT is a good example as well, and there have been some other magic systems that are similar. CoC SAN is often used in the same way. In fact it is used in EXACTLY the same way when casting spells (as they universally have a mandatory SAN loss when used). BRP in general also has POW, which is both an ability score AND a pool of points that various flavors of it use as a resource (sometimes it gets renamed in some versions). I believe that also comes from RQ.

Yes, but you normally don't also take damage to POW (it can happen, but under unusual cases), and the whole point in Sanity loss for spellcasting is to show that spellcasting is, generally, a bad idea in the setting.

I mean, OK, maybe Cypher leans a bit more heavily into that specific mechanic than most, but it is still a very classic skill/attribute/trait kind of system at its core.

I think you consider the above far, far more trivial than I do. And that's not even getting into the way experience is handled.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well it's difficult to respond in the abstract. Maybe @Manbearcat has thoughts on this dynamic. The first thing I would say is that for every roll, the GM sets the position the character is in and the possible effect. So a failure could mean the PC has a worse position or a more limited effect.

That wasn't really the question. I think I understand that conceptually. It was whether one of the assumptions was that whatever failure state the flashback would set up, its assumed that the consequences won't land until after the even that triggers the flashback--and I think from the responses I've gotten so far, that's effectively correct.

 

[Thomas Shey]

* If Consequence, then handle in a way that impacts play as interestingly as possible (which may include immediacy - intraScore) but doesn’t violate the established fiction and gamestate rules for Flashbacks. Best ways to do that are:

Thanks. That was how I kind of assumed it had to work, but I've made bad assumptions before about such things.

 

[pemerton]

The nature of what is being "put into the past" apparently matters quite a bit to some people.

The authors of D&D (to my knowledge) haven't found the need to bring up time travel in discussing knowledge checks, the authors of BitD did when discussing flashbacks.

clearly if you are going to run the world out of chronological order you will have to address issues related to causality, who could know what when and what the impact of that might be, etc. I guess if you want to look deeper into it, this kind of mechanic would not work in a game which was organized around GM's challenging players in a classic D&D sense. The player's agenda in that game is cast as being an antagonist to the GM's imagined fictional challenges, so they would logically exploit the limitations inherent in the situation (IE I can't die because it would create a paradox).

Classic D&D also doesn't have knowledge checks, though - other than a thief's Read Language, and as @AbdulAlhzared has already noted thief skills are the thin edge of the wedge for destabilising classic D&D play. There are rumour tables, but they're GM-side and either used as part of scenario set-up, or else without flashbacks (ie the players actually declare that their PCs go to the tavern and then the GM rolls for rumours that are learned).

In classic D&D the way you know what a monster can do is either by having remembered its entry in the Monster Manual, or by having actually played against it.