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

[AbdulAlhazred]

But as you can see from what I've said just above, I'm not following how you envisage the stakes being set in the safe case. @AbdulAlhazred's answer, upthread, was that it is established that of course the <whatever> is in <so-and-so's> safe. I get that. And can see how it would work in a 4e skill challenge, or Classic Traveller. But in that case, the stakes of opening the safe aren't Will I identify the villain? but Will I get the evidence of villainy that I need? The villain was identified at an earlier point in play.

I got a bit behind, but I was wondering how it matters. I mean, if the player is declaring an intent (explicitly or implicitly) to reveal the villain's identity by opening the safe, is that really different from "get the gold to raise my friend" or "get the papers to clear my name?" They're all GOALS and fulfill an intent. The fact that the villain's identity is unknown is not really significant. In that scenario we still have the character's plot identity as 'the villain', and we discover something about it, which PRESUMABLY is going to lead someplace, like its your sister, whom you love, and now you have to decide on revenge against the villain for killing your father, and murdering your sister, or letting her go...

The thing is, of course, there can be many layers of 'goals' and some can be a bit different sorts of things from others, but in the end they are things we are drawn towards, and they have 'opposites' in some dramatic sense, which we can be said to be pushed away from, and that can loom. Those are where our bad fortune checks get to take us! So, the masked villain is great, because it can be your sister (failed) or your boss (success). You DO want to kill your boss, right? Oh, drat it will put you out of a job, oh well....

 

[clearstream]

I'm really not interested in considering how players could be lazy or unfaithful or could flout the basic premises of robust play. There's a basic (if varying) level of plausibility to the fiction that everyone at the table has to agree to, and in more GNS-Narrative games, the group at large tends to hold to it (put another way, players generally self-police). Problem scenarios like this presume an adversarial attitude between participants that is a deeper problem than the details of how the game is played.

I very much agree with you on that. We can have doubts as to any participant's good faith and competence, but that is not the sort of play we aim to opt-into. Assessments may be tacitly prefaced with - "In the case of faithful players and trustworthy GM, conspiring competently within their constraints and principles." We can avoid assuming an adversarial attitude - players aren't reaching for +3 defenders in safes, GM isn't fabricating gotchas.

Sure that's fine. I just wanted to cover that base in case anybody was going to bring it up as a major objection.

I agree with you here, too. We might as well be speaking about robust play, because once we're envisioning spoilsports it's hard to put a boundary on the fall out. We'd have to preface with - "In the case of unfaithful players and untrustworthy GM, conflicting incompetently without constraints or principles." That doesn't seem worth talking about.

No, I mean that, if the GM does reserve that right, then my statement applies to HCS.

So locking would not be compatible with HCS, in the case that GM reserves all right to what's true about the world at large from moment to moment; the latter being what is generally expected in HCS. You imply not guaranteed to be the case, or at least judgement suspended as to whether it is always the case. Is that all right?

I'm interested in the part of your post I bolded above. Could you expand on that?

Players and GM working together. The continuous sequence of saying what follows (what follows situation, description, system), with deltas from imagination and system.

What I mean by deltas is, Sam says something that absolutely everyone agrees follows, but if Jo had been the speaker just then, Jo might have said something different. Sam and Jo's imaginative resources are not identical. Sam rolls a die, getting 6, propelling things one way. In a parallel world, Sam rolled a 10, propelling things a different way.

I described it as iterative because it's often like Harper's left-hand diagram (mutatis mutandis). Where the outputs of a (potentially vaguely) defined scene are effectively inputs to the next one. It can be viewed as applying our rules repeatedly to our game-state (fiction and system) so that it is continuously modified.

It's not exactly like this, but in a sense we possess a resource of implicit and explicit rules that may be clearly bounded in some respects, and vaguely in others, and we apply those rules repeatedly to a game-state (fiction and system) so that each next state is dissimilar from the previous, but can be seen in the previous in light of the rules. Here thinking of written system rules, tacit or spoken social rules, and rules of language and cognition.

 

[clearstream]

I think the point where we diverge is in terms of by whom the consequence is known! If it isn't known by the players going in, then they're kind of flying blind. I mean, its OK if they don't know every detail of what the negative consequence of failure will be (though they should have some idea that it will fall within certain boundaries). OTOH if the GM can give them his idea of what success means, what are we playing for?

In a way it's a bit like the Czege principle. No one participant should have absolute control of consequences and resolution, because then what are we playing for?

Hence players must know stakes going in (their intents inform them, and through their preparation, description, and system, they can constrain them) and as you say that is not all or nothing.

 

[pemerton]

It is unrelated to 1) quality of the safe 2) skill of the safe opener. It is not unrelated to the motives of the characters, but neither of the things you derive your odds for the paper being there measures that. So yes, these things are unrelated.


Right. So you admit that you shouldn't let the person with the low skill to try to open the safe as that will crash the odds of the paper being there?

And I get the idea of the motives of characters and desires of the players shaping the reality just fine, it just seems incoherent tome to bring obviously simulationist measures of safe quality and lockpicking skill into it then.

I don't "admit" anything. I have a player who, in both Burning Wheel and Torchbearer, likes to insert his PC into situations to which the character is not especially well-suited, in order to get "ticks" for progression on his character's abilities. Or on one occasion, when the stakes were very high, he insisted on going from A to B via the catacombs rather than above ground because he wanted to get a Catacombs-wise check out of it.

So it's completely feasible that a person with low skill might try to open the safe. But the stakes of that would reflect their PC's Beliefs, not the Beliefs of some other PC. And its a premise of the game that that PC's Beliefs are as important to that player as the Beliefs of the skilled safe cracking PC are to that PC's player.

If it's important to the non-safe cracking player that the dirt be found, then presumably they will be trying to do that through their preferred method. Perhaps the PCs already had an argument about that, and the safe cracker won the Duel of Wits - We're going to try the safe first, and I'll be the one to open it!.

As far as lockpicking skill and safe strength are concerned, in Burning Wheel these are not simulationist things. I think it was somewhere way upthread that I posted that BW has a veneer of process simulation but - in virtue of its core principles for resolution which include "say 'yes' or roll the dice", "intent and task", and "let it ride" - is actually a "story now" system.

What the lockpicking skill and safe strength do is provide colour. This is discussed briefly in the core rules but at length in the Adventure Burner (and that discussion is reproduced in the Codex): the imagined world is given shape and texture by the obstacles assigned to different components of it. So if you want the colour of your PC to be someone who collects dirt by finding it in safes, you better start building up your lockpicking skill! Maybe do some practice - but that will trigger seasonal Resources checks - and that is what drives the game.

I keep getting told that can be done but no explanation of what actually doing any of this looks like in the scenario I described.

I gave some descriptions in the post you're replying to!

Players are both around safe.
1. Who makes the first move?

This might already be settled by some prior consequence. If it's an open question, we can test Speed vs Speed.

2. The first player wants to open the safe and find incriminating evidence of his arch nemesis. What move does he make?

I'm talking Burning Wheel. So the move will be a test of some salient skill. What that is depends on both the task and the intent declared by the player. Perhaps lockpicking, perhaps augmented by other relevant skills (eg Safes-wise).

3. Does that move resolve to completion with out player B being able to offer any input? Or does player B get to interrupt the move or declare his own move before it’s resolved?

Burning Wheel doesn't have an action economy in the sense your question seems to presuppose. What consequence flowed from player B losing the Speed check? The GM will have narrated that having regard to what is at stake for each PC, which will depend on the Beliefs of the two PCs. And that will have been clear prior to resolving the Speed check (so that the players know how many of their resources - Fate or Persona points, Call-On traits, etc - they might want to use on the check).

The last time something in this neighbourhood happened in my play, two PCs drugged a NPC so they could get to a different NPC's home, where he was resting from severe wounds, without the drugged NPC, who wanted to kill that other NPC, following them. But then (as I said above) they went via the catacombs, and failed the Catacombs-wise check. So the next scene was the PCs, stuck in a dead end beneath a street grate not knowing which way to go, with the no-longer-drugged NPC looking mockingly down at them. So that made it a race: Speed vs Speed. The NPC won, and so the next scene was the PCs racing into the resting place just in time to see the NPC having beaten them there, about to decapitate the resting NPC. The NPC's Sword check succeeded, and so the resting NPC's head went rolling.

A race for the safe, and the establishment of consequences and subsequent framing, doesn't strike me as being any harder to do.

3b. In what order are moves resolved? Is there the streetwise or battle of wits resolution first and then the player that wins that gets first crack at the safe? Or does it work in a different order?

It depends on how scenes are framed and consequences incorporated. I've given an example above of how a Duel of Wits might be relevant in the safe context.

 

[pemerton]

Torchbearer has even more skills, but again, the way it handles them is cosmetically simulationist at best.

Right. That particular bit of Torchbearer is just straight-down-the-line Burning Wheel. It's all about colour. But whereas BW uses that colour to support character-driven "story now", TB uses it to support character-oriented "step on up". It's noteworthy that the TB rulebooks come right out and say "Don't always have the best lockpicker open the safe" and there are rules in the conflict-resolution subsystem to support that (as my players found out when the one with no Fighter skill had to try and fight off the ley-line-mutated moles in the Tower of Stars).

@Manbearcat - what you say about PC vs PC in BitD seems pretty similar to Burning Wheel. In BW the subsystems and so on are the same, except the GM shouldn't "say 'yes'" to one player if another player thinks there is something at stake! Nothing in what I posted just above about the race through the catacombs would have changed if the NPC was a PC, except that I might have framed a scene after she recovered from the drugs to establish what her player wanted her to do.

In another BW game, my PC wanted to murder an innkeeper and the other PC wanted to stop that. The other player insisted I make a Steel check to kill in cold blood: I agreed, and rolled, and failed, and hesitated for 4 heartbeats which was just enough time for the other PC to cast Persuasion. So I didn't murder the innkeeper; I just took his cashbox. It worked pretty much like John Harper says it should!

 

[pemerton]

@clearstream

You are quoting from the 1981 Book 0. I expressly referred to the 1977 edition of Traveller. I have previously posted that the later versions of Traveller - 1981, and The Traveller Book - swing towards a GM-as-glue High Concept Simulation approach. This is one reason why I prefer the 1977 edition.

Here are the rules for the 1977 edition Streetwise skill:

The individual is acquainted with the ways of local subcultures (which tend to be the same everywhere in human society), and thus is capable of dealing with strangers without alienating them. (This is not to be considered the same as alien contact, although the referee may so allow).

Close-knit sub-cultures (such as some portions of the lower classes, and trade groups such as workers, the underworld, etc) generally reject contact with strangers or unknown elements. Streetwise expertise allows contact for the purposes of obtaining information, hiring persons, purchasing contraband or stolen goods, etc.

The referee should set the throw required to obtain any item specified by the players (for example, the name of an official willing to issue li-censes without hassle = 5+, the location of high quality guns at a low price = 9+). DMs based on streetwise should be allowed at +1 per level. No expertise DM = −5.​

This is quite straightforward. First we have some flavour text explaining why the skill is portable from world to world (because humans are the same everywhere). Then we get what the skill permits: making contact to obtain information, hirelings, gear, etc. And then we get the precise resolution procedure: the player says what they are looking for, the GM sets a difficulty, and the check is made.

There is nothing that says the GM can ignore the outcome of the check.

All that is missing is advice on how to narrate failures. My own view is that a move" by the referee of some degree of hardness is appropriate.

 

[pemerton]

Players can work things to a point where the dirt must be in the safe, and there could still be a roll if some other complication were possible.


The more difficult case is if the group simply say "Sod it, let's break in and check the safe. Maybe the dirt is there, maybe not." No work done to get things to a locked in state. Player intent in this case is to prove that the dirt is or is not in this safe (as indicated by "maybe the dirt is there, maybe not"). If they can't open the safe (fail), they can't satisfy that intent. If they can open it (succeed), then they do satisfy that intent, even if the safe is empty.

But suppose a player dug their heels in and said - "I'm cracking this safe with the firm and specfic goal / intent of finding the dirt inside" despite having done nothing at all to lock that in!? I asses this as a degenerate case that puts the player in the position of spoilsport. It can also happen as an inadvertant instance of inept play (an antithesis of skilled play) in which case reminding that they've no clues as to what could be in the safe, so the declared intent toward it is ill-formed, gets things back on track. They adjust, maybe crack it, with renewed faithfulness as to what they can say that follows.

What does players work things mean? Either at some point a player gets to set stakes and succeed; or at some point the GM exercises their authority to declare that the players have "worked it enough".

Likewise for "having done nothing at all" or "having no clues". What do those mean? Either we're talking about a process of the players learning what is in the GM's notes, and/or satisfying the GM that they have done enough; or else at some point the players get to establish and resolve some stakes.

In my last Torchbearer session, a whole arc played out between a PC and a NPC - they met, formed an instant dislike, the NPC one-upped the PC and had him black-balled from the town market, and then the PC tracked down the NPC (taking the hit to his lifestyle check) for the sole purpose of making a fool of him in front of his (the NPC's) ladyfriend - which he did! That happened over probably half-an-hour to an hour of play and took maybe fifteen minutes in itself. The meeting was a Town Event roll; the one-upping was a vs check on Scholar that the player of the PC failed; the black-balling was a failed Resources check by the same player; the tracking down of the PC was me "saying 'yes'" (in TB that is a "Good Idea"); and the revenge was a vs check on Oratory.

Had the player "done enough" to be entitled to have his PC confront his NPC in a battle of words? How much is "enough"? The whole idea of gating stakes-resolving checks behind "doing work", "working things", "doing nothing at all", "having no clues", is exactly the sort of GM-as-glue that Harper is depicting in his non-story-now diagram.

are GMs trustworthy? I just add "In the case that GM is trustworthy,..." and the assessment is worked out from there.

Trust has nothing to do with it. I've played with GMs whose ability to deliver a satisfying CoC session is unparalleled. I absolutely trust them to have tight scenarios, compelling characters and amazing narration of insanity results.

That doesn't mean it's not high concept sim. It just means it's good high concept sim.

Baker and Harper aren't talking about trust. They're talking about who authors the fiction, and in accordance with what principles.

 

[pemerton]

Players and GM working together. The continuous sequence of saying what follows (what follows situation, description, system), with deltas from imagination and system.

What I mean by deltas is, Sam says something that absolutely everyone agrees follows, but if Jo had been the speaker just then, Jo might have said something different. Sam and Jo's imaginative resources are not identical. Sam rolls a die, getting 6, propelling things one way. In a parallel world, Sam rolled a 10, propelling things a different way.

I described it as iterative because it's often like Harper's left-hand diagram (mutatis mutandis). Where the outputs of a (potentially vaguely) defined scene are effectively inputs to the next one. It can be viewed as applying our rules repeatedly to our game-state (fiction and system) so that it is continuously modified.

It's not exactly like this, but in a sense we possess a resource of implicit and explicit rules that may be clearly bounded in some respects, and vaguely in others, and we apply those rules repeatedly to a game-state (fiction and system) so that each next state is dissimilar from the previous, but can be seen in the previous in light of the rules. Here thinking of written system rules, tacit or spoken social rules, and rules of language and cognition.

All you're saying here is that there is a conversation, in which things are said and what is said next depends on what was said before.

It's like Harper's "story now" diagram only in the sense that that is a model of one particular way of structuring a RPG conversation. It's also like Harper's other diagram, which is also a model of a different way of structuring a RPG conversation.

Of course the outputs of scenes input the next scene. Otherwise it would hardly be a RPG worth the name! But who decides those outputs? Who frames the next scene? According to what procedures and what principles? All the action is in the answer's to those questions.

 

[clearstream]

1977

Spoiler: 1977 Streetwise

The individual is acquainted with the ways of local subcultures (which tend to be the same everywhere in human society), and thus is capable of dealing with strangers without alienating them. (This is not to be considered the same as alien contact, although the referee may so allow).

Close-knit sub-cultures (such as some portions of the lower classes, and trade groups such as workers, the underworld, etc) generally reject contact with strangers or unknown elements. Streetwise expertise allows contact for the purposes of obtaining information, hiring persons, purchasing contraband or stolen goods, etc.

The referee should set the throw required to obtain any item specified by the players (for example, the name of an official willing to issue li-censes without hassle = 5+, the location of high quality guns at a low price = 9+). DMs based on streetwise should be allowed at +1 per level. No expertise DM = −5.

1981

Spoiler: 1981 Streetwise

The individual is acquainted with the ways of local subcultures (which tend to be the same everywhere in human society), and thus is capable of dealing with strangers without alienating them. This skill is not the same as alien contact experience.

Close-knit subcultures (such as some portions of the lower classes, trade groups such as workers, and the underworld) generally reject contact with strangers or unknown elements. Streetwise expertise allows contact for the purposes of obtaining information, hiring persons, purchasing or selling contraband or stolen goods, and other shady or borderline activities.

Referee: After establishing throws for various activities desired by the characters (such as the name of an official willing to issue licenses without hassle: 5+; the location of high quality guns at low prices: 9+), allow streetwise as a DM. If streetwise is not used, impose a DM of -5.

The text is nearly identical: I've underlined the salient difference. Both texts are silent on the truth or otherwise of information acquired. Can you therefore post the text that you will find earlier in the book on procedures and handling of information?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't "admit" anything. I have a player who, in both Burning Wheel and Torchbearer, likes to insert his PC into situations to which the character is not especially well-suited, in order to get "ticks" for progression on his character's abilities. Or on one occasion, when the stakes were very high, he insisted on going from A to B via the catacombs rather than above ground because he wanted to get a Catacombs-wise check out of it.

So it's completely feasible that a person with low skill might try to open the safe. But the stakes of that would reflect their PC's Beliefs, not the Beliefs of some other PC. And its a premise of the game that that PC's Beliefs are as important to that player as the Beliefs of the skilled safe cracking PC are to that PC's player.

If it's important to the non-safe cracking player that the dirt be found, then presumably they will be trying to do that through their preferred method. Perhaps the PCs already had an argument about that, and the safe cracker won the Duel of Wits - We're going to try the safe first, and I'll be the one to open it!.

Right. So who opens the safe will affect the contents of the safe. But the characters presumably don't think this is the case, yet the players know it to be so. This sort of system causes almost complete disconnect between the decision making process of the players and the decision making process of the characters. Hell, why would the characters even debate who opens the safe? They certainly cannot know it would in any way or form affect the contents! In universe it would make perfect sense for one character to say "Go ahead, you do it, you're good with locks. But I sure hope it's those papers in there rather than just some pointless gold you're always after!"

This obviously doesn't bug you, and good for you. But it would bug me massively.

As far as lockpicking skill and safe strength are concerned, in Burning Wheel these are not simulationist things. I think it was somewhere way upthread that I posted that BW has a veneer of process simulation but - in virtue of its core principles for resolution which include "say 'yes' or roll the dice", "intent and task", and "let it ride" - is actually a "story now" system.

What the lockpicking skill and safe strength do is provide colour. This is discussed briefly in the core rules but at length in the Adventure Burner (and that discussion is reproduced in the Codex): the imagined world is given shape and texture by the obstacles assigned to different components of it. So if you want the colour of your PC to be someone who collects dirt by finding it in safes, you better start building up your lockpicking skill! Maybe do some practice - but that will trigger seasonal Resources checks - and that is what drives the game.

It is not just colour, it affects the odds massively. In fact GMs determination of the difficulty affects things way more steeply in BW than in 5e D&D, and it is far easier to make things virtually or literally impossible. Why on Earth would such a huge impact be given to simulationist measures such as safe quality, which has basically nothing to do with what you're actually intertest about, that being the beliefs and desires of the characters?