System matters and free kriegsspiel

[Fenris-77]

At the very least I see some real success in that we're now talking about system and not playing roshambo with each other. There's going to be some difficulty talking about 'FKR' in the same way as there is about PbtA - both are closer to design philosophies (or maybe desired table experience philosophy in the case of FKR, but whatever) than are are a single 'thing'. I'm happy to ask questions and learn something.

 

[Manbearcat]

But you do (use genre logic in real life). Your entire life has trained you to expect and accept certain things from a wide but limited list. In real life you wouldn't shrug off seeing a person lift off from the ground, unaided, and simply fly away. Nor would you be blasé about a person breaking off part of a building and throwing it. The "real world" is just as much a genre with genre rules and tropes and expectations as any other.

I don't have time to get to all of your post (I have to get one of my Blades' games Faction/Setting Clocks resolved and written up before tomorrow night's game..."playing the world" FitD style!), but I wanted to pull this out because (IMO) if this isn't enormously controversial, it surely should be.

I also think this hooks into my DC 30...DC 35(?) 5e post from 2016 where I specifically asked folks to discuss their adjudication process of endgame Mythic Tier action declarations (genre logic or naturalistic causal logic). That was a train wreck of utter incoherency and I feel like what you're saying above (which IMO is problematic for player's intuiting how any given instance of action declaration will be ruled upon) is related.

What you're saying above (I, and everyone else, uses genre logic in real life) just makes no sense to me. Why? Genre logic is when a reader or a participant in a game has their orientation to a moment of fiction (either now or upon reflection or when making predictions about the future) anchored to/by the tropes inherent to that fiction.

Despite the fact that naturalistic causal logic (gravity and thermodynamics and muskuloskeletal systems and energy transfer and the impact of moral hazards on social fabric) might remain exactly the same, in Swashbuckling Space Opera we expect a very different set of tropes to emerge than we do in Sci Fi Horror. As the reader or as the participant at a game table, your inferences, intuitions, and predictions are going to be entirely different from one another.

This shouldn't be particularly controversial as so much of the ire against 4e was due to the "mythic superhero logic" that undergirded every moment of play and the trajectory as a whole. The conversations on this subject (genre disparity) are legion (despite the fact that the naturalistic causal logic of a PoL setting would be exactly the same as FR or Greyhawk or even Dark Sun etc).


So to land this airplane...no, I don't use genre logic in real life. My intuitions, inferences, and predictions aren't governed by some kind of "trope coefficient" (lets call it) whereby its significantly more likely that some naturalistic causal logic defying instantiation of an event is apt to happen (because the world is anchored to genre tropes). When I look at a V4 Boulder (the upper boundaries of my capabilities...they go up to V17 by the way...so that should give you an idea of how utterly ordinary I am as a climber), I evaluate prospective routes based on a lot of parameters (many native to me and my abilities but many native to the nature of the nuances of the obstacle). I have intuitions, I draw inferences, and I make predictions. But none of those 3 are anchored to/governed by "I'm the hero of my story so I really should be able to climb this" or "falling would be anticlimactic" or "the rising action should happen right before the crux and the ascent will be the denouement" or "that vent right above the boulder is where I expect a band of ninjas to drop out" or "is that a sniper at the top of that boulder across the way...of course" or "a fall and a broken arm and then cut to my montage of my recovery process where I beat Chad the Douche Climber in the THE BIG CLIMB OFF" or "the douchey corporate lackey comes in to foreclose on the place with a big jerk smirk on his face but we all rally behind the salf-of-the-earth gym owners and raise money through car washes and lemonade stands and punt the corporate jerk to the moon afterward."

My intuitions, inferences, and predictions are all grounded by a world liberated from any "trope coefficient" (sadly I might add). Hence, no genre logic.

EDIT - All of the above that I've said is why that DC 30...35 thread (and the incoherent/conflated handling of naturalistic causal logic with a collage of genre tropes) was so fraught. If I'm a player and I think any of your (a) situation framing or (b) your credibility test handling (yes you can do that...no you can't do that) or (c) your DC adjudication (the DC is extremely hard because it indexes a normal person...the DC is between medium and hard because DC indexes mythic tier adventurers rather than the standard distributions of adult humanoids in FR) or (d) consequence handling wobbles (its naturalistic causal logic in this case...it indexes normal humanoids in that case...it indexes mythical greek tropes in that case...some opaque combination of all of it) to and fro...AND I'm reliant upon it NOT wobbling (being consistent and intuitive so I can make reliable inferences and predictions which orient me to the situation and the move-space I can feasibly or reliably make).

Well, that wobble is a huge problem.

 

[pemerton]

I have intuitions, I draw inferences, and I make predictions. But none of those 3 are anchored to/governed by "I'm the hero of my story so I really should be able to climb this" or "falling would be anticlimactic" or "the rising action should happen right before the crux and the ascent will be the denouement" or "that vent right above the boulder is where I expect a band of ninjas to drop out" or "is that a sniper at the top of that boulder across the way...of course" or "a fall and a broken arm and then cut to my montage of my recovery process where I beat Chad the Douche Climber in the THE BIG CLIMB OFF" or "the douchey corporate lackey comes in to foreclose on the place with a big jerk smirk on his face but we all rally behind the salf-of-the-earth gym owners and raise money through car washes and lemonade stands and punt the corporate jerk to the moon afterward."

That last one seems like it should be a Masks downtime scenario? (Like Claremont was sick for the week and so some fill-in had to write that issue of New Mutants.)

But the most interesting, I think, is the rising action should happen right before the crux and the ascent will be the denouement. Whether the successful climb is where the action is, or whether the successful planning/prediction is where the action is (I'm thinking a climbing version of how Robert Downey Jr's Sherlock Holmes fights), will affect the feel of things quite a bit.

 

[overgeeked]

Why would it? I guess that's a fair question. Think of it in terms of D&D, although that isn't particularly my jam. If I have a +8 to climb, i have a pretty good handhold (har har) on my chances of climbing any given wall..

Not really. Your climbing ability is not related to the difficulty of the wall. You cannot suppose one from the other. You can assume or...

especially when you add in that the basic spread of DCs is the same from DM to DM.

Look in the book for the answer. And once you have, you can then surmise your chances to climb a wall...except that the DM still sets the DC based on circumstances in the moment based on the fiction. So your +8 to climb could be spectacular (DC10 with advantage on the roll) or it could be meaningless (DC40 with disadvantage on the roll).

Now that really isn't materially different than 'climby', I'll grant you, but is more grounded. By which I mean I'm comparing a number I know to a likely range of numbers.

I don't think grounded is the right word. Grounded would be grounded in...something. Like grounded in reality. I think comforted is a better word. At a guess, you're comforted by the knowledge that the books list DCs and the assumption that the DM will pick something within that range. Likely because you think that list of DCs limits the DM to that certain known range of difficulty, but that's simply not true. The DM is free to make it an automatic success, automatic failure, or a roll with a DC between 2 and 50+, and use advantage or disadvantage.

Whereas with climby I'm comparing a less-well-defined number against a complete unknown.

Right. The unknown is scary. You're concerned that the DM might make a bad or unfair call. I get it. But there's nothing stopping a D&D DM from doing the same. The list of DC in the book doesn't stop the DM from doing any of the things I mention above. So it's a false sense of security.

To grant another point, in both cases I can ask the GM "how climbable does the wall of the keep look?" which is perfectly reasonable question in the vein of what are my chances rather than may I. However, the answer to that question in D&D provides me, the player, with significantly more information than it does in FKR.

It depends entirely on the particular FKR game and Referee. An FKR Ref is just as capable of telling you that you need to roll an 8+/2d6 as the D&D DM is of telling you the DC is 20. There's nothing preventing that from happening. You just assume it won't or can't. If it's an opposed roll you can see what the FKR Ref rolls with their 2d6 so you know exactly what you need to get. Also, in my experience, most DMs don't tell the player what the DC is before they roll the dice. The DM asks for a roll and the player does so and adds everything up and declares what they got. So the player generally doesn't know what DC they need to hit for success. Some things like the AC of a monster can be worked out in short order, but basically every other roll in the game is rolled "blind."

The language of the answer in D&D indexes DC pretty precisely even if the DC isn't mentioned, which gives the player a very good idea what the PCs chances of climbing the wall are, which is solid emulation of a PCs fictional ability to decide that same thing for himself.

I don't know about that. You think a climber can look at a wall and deduce precisely what their percentage chances of scaling the wall are? That seems more than a bit far fetched. The real-world climber might gauge a wall and guesstimate their chances. But not know exactly what they are. They may have done it a thousand times, but if their concentration falters or they misjudge something, they're still going to fall.

A caveat: this isn't me showing my flag as a hyper-cautious player. I'm not. I drive characters like stolen cars, to borrow a phrase, but a big part of enjoying that is that the games I like don't surprise me on the mechanics side, just on the consequences and results side.

Sure. And we all have our preferences. But that's not what FKR games do. There aren't any "surprises" on the mechanics side. Most of them have "roll 2d6, roll high" as their mechanics. What's the surprise? Referee adjudication? You still have that same "surprise" with most other RPGs.

To be clear, I bet this problem clears up with time played at the FKR table, and I'm really thinking about this as a new player trying to learn a system and figure out my character.

Which specific game are you trying to play? Check the discord server. There's a lot of more knowledgeable people there.

I just see a lot of scope for FKR to feel like a shallow information environment with a lot of disconnects between GM and player knowledge sets and expectations.

All the same information is there, but instead of reading the rulebook you ask the Referee.

 

[Fenris-77]

OK, I'm going to pull something out of the above post to mention first and shout about a bit. DCs are not picked out of a hat. It's not some magic could be 10 could be 40 proposition. That's nonsense, no one plays D&D like that. D&D isn't my favorite game, but I am intimately familiar with the rules, both current and previous. But go on I suppose, tell me how DCs range by 30 on the regular...

OK, got that out my system. Whew.

More generally, I find your readings of my posts somewhat uncharitable. For example, your lovely strawman built around the term precise. I didn't say that at all, and was actually pretty clear about what I did say. I said comparing a known mod to a known range of DCs was more grounded, in that I can, as a player, know what is likely. The word precise comes in because, in most D&D play, the movement from the DM thinking of a DC and translating that into a descriptor is pretty reliable. Words like easy, hard, or whatever all index a pretty narrow range of possible DCs.

No surprises on the mechanics side? Really? How about the GM choosing my mods and the target mods in secret? And then applying them to my roll for me? Surprise! The mechanics are more than just roll 2d6, it's everything else that feeds in, and in FKR that part is a black box from the player perspective.

How do I make informed decisions for my character when I have to ask the ref everything? I just don't see how those two bits fit together, and not for lack of trying.

 

[overgeeked]

I don't have time to get to all of your post (I have to get one of my Blades' games Faction/Setting Clocks resolved and written up before tomorrow night's game..."playing the world" FitD style!), but I wanted to pull this out because (IMO) if this isn't enormously controversial, it surely should be.

I also think this hooks into my DC 30...DC 35(?) 5e post from 2016 where I specifically asked folks to discuss their adjudication process of endgame Mythic Tier action declarations (genre logic or naturalistic causal logic). That was a train wreck of utter incoherency and I feel like what you're saying above (which IMO is problematic for player's intuiting how any given instance of action declaration will be ruled upon) is related.

What you're saying above (I, and everyone else, uses genre logic in real life) just makes no sense to me. Why? Genre logic is when a reader or a participant in a game has their orientation to a moment of fiction (either now or upon reflection or when making predictions about the future) anchored to/by the tropes inherent to that fiction.

What? No. Genre is a loose collection of tropes that we recognize and label as "space opera," "horror," "fantasy," etc. "Genre logic" is simply a gauge of whether a particular story is conforming to the expectations presented by those tropes. If you label something as an alien invasion story and there's no aliens and no invasion...you've successfully subverted genre expectations, but likely not in a fun and interesting way. If you label something as a zombie apocalypse story and there's zombies...but they're new and different in interesting ways...you've successfully subverted genre expectations in likely a fun and interesting way. As above, realism is a genre. What makes realism a genre? The collection of genre tropes related to realism. What makes them realistic? The fact that they conform to reality. Reality can be seen as just another genre.

Despite the fact that naturalistic causal logic (gravity and thermodynamics and muskuloskeletal systems and energy transfer and the impact of moral hazards on social fabric) might remain exactly the same, in Swashbuckling Space Opera we expect a very different set of tropes to emerge than we do in Sci Fi Horror. As the reader or as the participant at a game table, your inferences, intuitions, and predictions are going to be entirely different from one another.

Right. But unless those tropes are specifically changed...there's no reason to assume they have been. So if there's something not covered by the sci-fi horror tropes, you can default to the realism tropes to cover everything else. To put that another way, the baseline is reality, then you pile the genre tropes you want to use on top of that. If there's any contradictions, the genre tropes win out against the reality tropes. So if you're playing swashbuckling space opera you'll expect physics to bend in places, break in others, and be exactly as we know it in the rest. FTL and pew pew noises in space. But having a 2 ton piece of metal land on you in full gravity is bad news.

So to land this airplane...no, I don't use genre logic in real life. My intuitions, inferences, and predictions aren't governed by some kind of "trope coefficient" (lets call it) whereby its significantly more likely that some naturalistic causal logic defying instantiation of an event is apt to happen (because the world is anchored to genre tropes).

Conduct an experiment with me. Treating characters in the game / genre story as real people living in a real world is one of the goals of the FKR. If we treat them as real people inhabiting a real world...what would someone in the Star Wars universe say about genre logic and their lived experience? They'd likely say much the same as you are now. The genre tropes the characters live with is their lived experience. They'd have no awareness of it from an omniscient outside perspective. They'd have no concept of their lived experience being "off" from "reality"...their lived experience is their reality. We recognize it as genre tropes because we're outside observers. If we presented our reality to them, ours would be the genre story with an off-kilter reality.

When I look at a V4 Boulder (the upper boundaries of my capabilities...they go up to V17 by the way...so that should give you an idea of how utterly ordinary I am as a climber), I evaluate prospective routes based on a lot of parameters (many native to me and my abilities but many native to the nature of the nuances of the obstacle). I have intuitions, I draw inferences, and I make predictions.

Exactly. You don't have a precise, concrete gauge of your percentage chances of making a climb.

But none of those 3 are anchored to/governed by "I'm the hero of my story so I really should be able to climb this" or "falling would be anticlimactic" or "the rising action should happen right before the crux and the ascent will be the denouement" or "that vent right above the boulder is where I expect a band of ninjas to drop out" or "is that a sniper at the top of that boulder across the way...of course" or "a fall and a broken arm and then cut to my montage of my recovery process where I beat Chad the Douche Climber in the THE BIG CLIMB OFF" or "the douchey corporate lackey comes in to foreclose on the place with a big jerk smirk on his face but we all rally behind the salf-of-the-earth gym owners and raise money through car washes and lemonade stands and punt the corporate jerk to the moon afterward."

Ah. You're conflating genre with story structure. That's not how FKR games work. There's no push for emulating storytelling. No act structure or denouement. No inciting incident or hero's journey. FKR games are solidly emergent storytelling, in my experience.

My intuitions, inferences, and predictions are all grounded by a world liberated from any "trope coefficient" (sadly I might add). Hence, no genre logic.

Again, I think you're conflating genre with story structure. I'm not talking about story structure. I don't assume I will prevail after a dark night of the soul...I expect another dark night of the soul. What I'm talking about is that there's no alien invasions or zombie apocalypses. There are no superheroes. Physics works a particular way and we can make predictions based on that.

 

[overgeeked]

OK, I'm going to pull something out of the above post to mention first and shout about a bit. DCs are not picked out of a hat. It's not some magic could be 10 could be 40 proposition. That's nonsense, no one plays D&D like that. D&D isn't my favorite game, but I am intimately familiar with the rules, both current and previous. But go on I suppose, tell me how DCs range by 30 on the regular...

"The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules aren't in charge. You're the DM, and you are in charge of the game." 5E DMG, p4.

"As a referee, the DM acts as a mediator between the rules and the players. A player tells the DM what he or she wants to do, and the DM determines whether it is successful or not, in some cases asking the player to make a die roll to determine success." 5E DMG, p5.

The rules of the game say the DM is in charge and free to change the rules. The DM is free to set the DC. The DMG gives guidelines that the DM is free to follow or ignore at their pleasure. The DM sets the DC and assigns dis/advantage.

More generally, I find your readings of my posts somewhat uncharitable. For example, your lovely strawman built around the term precise. I didn't say that at all, and was actually pretty clear about what I did say. I said comparing a known mod to a known range of DCs was more grounded, in that I can, as a player, know what is likely. The word precise comes in because, in most D&D play, the movement from the DM thinking of a DC and translating that into a descriptor is pretty reliable. Words like easy, hard, or whatever all index a pretty narrow range of possible DCs.

Again, it's a false sense of grounded as the DM can set whatever DC they like. You assume they will set it within the specified range. But there's no guarantee. The DM can also assign advantage and disadvantage and also declare things automatic success or automatic failure.

No surprises on the mechanics side? Really? How about the GM choosing my mods and the target mods in secret?

Most FKR games don't use modifiers of any kind. It's mostly a straight 2d6 roll, higher is better. If it's opposed, both sides roll 2d6, higher roll wins. There's no mods to hide from you. And again, the DM in D&D generally doesn't announce the DCs before the player makes a roll. So whatever modifiers they're using are secret, unless it's advantage or disadvantage for the player. You don't know the DC of a climb check...ever. You only know if you've succeeded or failed. You don't know the AC of a monster until you find out if you've hit or missed...then over the course of a fight triangulate what the AC actually is.

The mechanics are more than just roll 2d6, it's everything else that feeds in, and in FKR that part is a black box from the player perspective.

Exactly like most every other game. The DM generally doesn't announce to the player exactly what the DC of a given check is before the player rolls...nor do they announce exactly what and how and why the DC is what it is. The DC in D&D is a black box from the player's perspective.

How do I make informed decisions for my character when I have to ask the ref everything?

You mean exactly like most every other game? You as a player only know what's on your character sheet until the DM informs you. If you want to know more...you have to ask the DM. How do you make informed decisions in D&D? You read the rulebook and assume the DM will follow those guidelines and further assume that you are now making informed decisions...then in the moment in play when a question comes up...you still have to ask the DM. So instead of reading the rulebook and having a few layers of assumptions...just ask the Referee. They're running the show anyway. They will know better than the book.

 

[S'mon]

Ah. You're conflating genre with story structure. That's not how FKR games work. There's no push for emulating storytelling. No act structure or denouement. No inciting incident or hero's journey. FKR games are solidly emergent storytelling, in my experience.

Yeah. I'm not sure MBC can really grok this, though, since his concept of RPGs is so intimately linked to fiction as story. Pemerton does I think, since he understands you can have World-Sim in a non-real world.

 

[S'mon]

Re DCs, IMO the GM should always announce the DC in advance of the attempt, unless there is very good reason the PC would not know the difficulty of the task. I think Insight checks (which are a peculiar mechanic) should likely have hidden DCs. Wall climbing, almost never.

I remember seeing Lloyd/Lindybeige go further and argue that the actual climb-wall roll should be made before the character attempts to climb the wall, but he was thinking more of Runequest or pre-3e D&D with fixed platonic success %s.

Certainly in an FKR game where the GM rolls 2d6 as the opposed roll to player 2d6, the GM should roll their 2d6 before the player decides to make the attempt. The PC should be able to see if this climb is a 2, a 7 or a 12.

Edit: I find with 5e, my players seem to pretty well assume that any DC is 15 unless I say different pre-roll. They're always surprised to succeed on a 10. If it's a Hard task DC 20, I'm pretty good about telling them. My son with his high level Rogue auto-hitting a 24 is always annoyed when I say some outlandish task is a 25, though.

 

[Numidius]

I wrote the OP in this thread. It was not any sort of criticism of free kriegsspiel; it was an analysis.

And someone else turned this into a thread about FKR. Which is fine by me.

I think I would find it helpful if someone who thinks they "get" FKR better than me would identify some of the rules-heavy systems that are the objects of its critique. As I've said, 3E D&D seems to me to be the core of it; but are there other systems that are also being had in mind?

Not far upthread @Numidius suggested that D&D-style spells are compatible with FKR. Can RQ be played in a FKR-adjacent fashion?

Anyway, it seems time to mention Vincent Baker on cubes and clouds: a list of those blogs is here, and here's the one I know best: anyway: 3 Resolution Systems.

Obviously FKR is very hostile to cubes-to-cubes resolution (D&D hit points; WotC D&D stop-motion initiative; at least some interpretations of the action economy and PC abilities that affect it more generally; damage-on-a-miss, which tends to undercut Baker's treatment of "I hit" as a cubes-to-cloud relationship; etc). They love cloud-to-cloud.

It's the attitude towards cubes-to-cloud that I'm unclear about, because it is sometimes called for but there is a least an intermittent hostility to systematisation, though not a uniform hostility. (The AW-flavoured FKR clearly has a systematic mechanical framework, of rolling dice whose size reflects fictional likelihoods of prevailing in a given sort of contest.)

Shadowrun, Traveller, Cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu, AD&D, OD&D have been played FKR/freeform/ultralight over the years... as far as I know. I guess that's not much of a reaction against heavy rule-books, instead more of a love for those settings.

Runequest FKR? I guess Yes, why not?

Cubes to cloud: the most suggested cube is opposed 2d6. Then interpretation of results leads back to cloud.
My take: 9 vs 10 both opponents do well but it's basically a tie. 3 vs 4 both perform poorly, again a tie.

But the Gm could just use any type of resolution they prefer. Even full-on Rolemaster's Laws books altogether. As long as it is not player facing.

Justin H/Aboleth overlords blog
"When playing Pathfinder are you negotiating the fictional world, or are you making decisions out of a priority to game the numbers?"

Highlighted stats in AW come to mind, as an example.
As any player facing reward cycle.

(Bracing for impact from fellow posters assault, now)

[Edit to mitigate: Also XP and automatic advancement!]