D&D General The Alexandrian’s Insights In a Nutshell [+]

[mamba]

Well, the thing is, Apocalypse World is a published game, with clear advice on how to prep and what that prep is for. It doesn't involve any random rolling for anything that happens, and nor does it involve zero prep. So obviously those are not the only possible options!

then you see a difference between what JA says to do and what you do, that I am not seeing, maybe it is the word ‘clue’ instead of a more neutral ‘information’, maybe his situations are more granular than what you prep

 

[kenada]

For me, this raises a question, or perhaps its better to say it generates an implication, that I've often pointed to in contrasting Gygax's PHB with his DMG.

Gygax's PHB concludes (prior to its appendices) with a discussion of Successful Adventuring. This includes play advice, which is based mostly around the idea of first, scout and map some part of the dungeon so as to identify an objective for a raid, and then prepare for the raid, and undertake it, very purposefully. The premise of this advice is that rooms are keyed, so that at the first stage the players can (in effect) reveal the key, and then at the second stage, act on that knowledge.

The advice becomes useless if the key is not stable. Gygax in his DMG gives advice about "living" and "responsive" dungeon" which will have the effect of making the key not stable. This undermines the advice he gave a year earlier in his PHB.

The idea of "adversary rosters" seems to me to raise a similar concern: it makes it hard for the players to obtain reliable information about the dungeon, which they can then plan around.

Have I missed something? Is there some other workaround I've not noticed? Or is the idea of players reveal the key, then prep and act on that knowledge not an element of the play in which adversary rosters figure?

For adversary rosters in particular, players following Gygax’s advice would need to scout sufficiently to establish which monsters are nearby, so they can take them into account with their planning. If there are none, that allows for noisier (and presumably more violent) solutions to the current problem. If there are, then the PCs need to be careful dealing with the first monsters, neutralize the others before engaging the first group, or figure out a way to prevent (or slow) the other monsters from coming to aid the first.

I would distinguish adversary rosters from other techniques (such as wandering monsters and restocking procedures) in that it doesn’t change the dungeon’s topology. The monsters are still where they are. What is different is the scope of threats you have to consider compared to focusing on only one area at a time (‘monsters sitting in a room’).

 

[kenada]

except that it does not. The post has you create a sequence of the events that happen due to the actions of the villains and NPCs, if the players do not interfere.

The players then do whatever they decide to do, and that can either intersect with these events, change them, or not affect them at all. So you did not plan a plot for the characters that you now have to make sure they follow.

Justin provides contrasting examples in “Don’t Prep Plots”. The first is what he calls a plot:

(1) The PCs pursue the villains. (What if they don’t?)​

(2) The PCs have to choose to follow them by ship. (What if they decide to ride down the coast? Or teleport?)​

(3) The PCs have to spot the derelict. (What if they roll poorly on their Perception check?)​

(4) The PCs have to board the derelict. (What if they just sail past it?)​

(5) The PCs have to rescue the survivor. (What if they fail? Or choose to flee before realizing the survivor is there?)​

(6) The PCs have to question the survivor. (What if they decide not to pressure an injured man?)​

(7) The PCs have to go to the central sanctuary of the temple.​

(8) The assassination attempt on the PCs has to play out in a very specific way.​

The second one is proposed as a situation:

(1) The PCs have to pursue the villains. (This is the hook into the entire scenario. It’s a potential failure point shared by all scenarios. If the PCs aren’t interested in going to the red dragon’s lair, it doesn’t matter how you prep the lair.)​

(2) You need to design the city of Tharsis. (Where is it? What’s it like? What can the PCs do there? Et cetera.)​

(3) You need to design the derelict ship.​

(4) You need to design the Temple of Olympus.​

(5) You need to stat up the Tharsis navy, the villains, and (possibly) the survivor.​

(6) There needs to be a way for the PCs to know the villains are hiding out in the Temple of Olympus. (In the plot-based design, this is one of the failure points: They either question the survivor or they have no way of knowing where to go next. In situation-based design, you would use the Three Clue Rule and figure out two additional methods by which the PCs could reach this conclusion. This can be as simple as making a Gather Information check in Tharsis and/or questioning the captain/crew of the ship the villains took.)​

Note the commentary in number six. The problem is not that that GM has decided the PCs have to go to the central sanctuary of the temple. It’s that the techniques used to accomplish that goal are vulnerable to failure (unless the GM acts overtly to ensure the required event happens). If the PCs don’t question the survivor, they have no way of knowing where to go next. Justin suggests using the three clue rule to remove this failure point by providing redundancy.

If to you the plot is ‘events that happen in the world if the players do nothing’, then I do not really know how run a game without having that… are you randomly rolling everything that happens to the players with zero preparation? That seems to be the only possible option

What I am referring to “plot” is predetermined events that have to happen. This is similar to the definition Justin offers in the introduction of “Don’t Prep Plots”:

First, a definition of terms: A plot is the sequence of events in a story.​

​

And the problem with trying to prep a plot for an RPG is that you’re attempting to pre-determine events that have not yet happened. Your gaming session is not a story — it is a happening. It is something about which stories can be told, but in the genesis of the moment it is not a tale being told. It is a fact that is transpiring.​

The issue I am identifying is that the solution being proposed is only changing how you arrive at those pre-determined events. Justin expands upon this technique in his “Node-Based Design” series of essays. Each of the critical events the GM wants to happen would be funnel points.

the use by JA, clue as a lead to solve a mystery is a bit more formal but still mostly accurate, in your case the ‘mystery’ then is the location of the bandit camp

In a sense, yes. Any information that points to something else is a “clue”. When the GM describes a cave and then describes the statues out front of adventures and hapless (and unlucky) people terrified of something, that is a clue there is some kind of monster (a basilisk, gorgon, medusa, etc) that can turn people to stone. As noted in post #41, I’m trying to distinguish between that (saying something about the world or foreshadowing danger) and wanting a specific event to occur. For example, if I want the players to fight the monster in the cave, then foreshadowing the danger may be self-defeating if it causes them to flee or pursue some other approach.

ok, then I might have misunderstood how you arrived at handing out the clues, but it does not change the fact that you do provide clues, even if the fashion in which you hand them out is based on random events rather than by having them placed in the world explicitly for the chars to find (or miss).

Random events or in response to actions the PCs undertake. If the PCs undertook some action (such as consorting with contacts, performing research, etc) with the goal of finding out where the bandits are, and they rolled a success, I would be obligated to tell them where the bandits are (in a way that respects both the state of the world and follows from how the information was required).

Ultimately how you hand them out (random event, specific placement, thinking on your feet in the moment based on what the chars do) does not matter. You do have to pass information to the players to act upon (or not), you cannot really avoid that altogether.

For Justin, the difference matters. He views having the clues be placed, discovering them, and interpreting them as necessary to play a mystery scenario. He says in his “Three Clue Rule” essay (parenthetical added for context):

This (the approach used by Gumshoe) is a mechanical solution to the problem. But while it may result in a game session which superficially follows the structure of a mystery story, I think it fails because it doesn’t particularly feel as if you’re playing a mystery.​

​

Laws’ fundamental mistake, I think, is in assuming that a mystery story is fundamentally about following a “bread crumb trail” of clues. Here’s a quote from a design essay on the subject:​

​

I’d argue, first of all, that these fears are misplaced, and arise from a fundamental misperception. The trail of clues, or bread crumb plot, is not the story, and does not constitute a pre-scripted experience. What the PCs choose to do, and how they interact with each other as they solve the mystery, is the story. As mentioned in The Esoterrorist rules, we saw this at work during playtest, as all of the groups had very different experiences of the sample scenario, as each GM and player combo riffed in their own unique ways off the situations it suggested.​

​

But, in point of fact, this type of simplistic “A leads to B leads to C leads to D” plotting is not typical of the mystery genre. For a relatively simplistic counter-example, let’s return to Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet:​

​

WATSON: “That seems simple enough,” said I; but how about the other man’s height?”​

​

HOLMES: “Why, the height of a man, in nine cases out of ten, can be told from the length of his stride. It is a simple calculation enough, though there is no use my boring you with figures. I had this fellow’s stride both on the clay outside and on the dust within. Then I had a way of checking my calculation. When a man writes on a wall, his instinct leads him to write above the level of his own eyes. Now that writing was just over six feet from the ground. It was child’s play.”​

​

This is just one small deduction in a much larger mystery, but you’ll note that Holmes has in fact gathered several clues, studied them, and then distilled a conclusion out of them. And this is, in fact, the typical structure of the mystery genre: The detective slowly gathers a body of evidence until, finally, a conclusion emerges. In the famous words of Holmes himself, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”​

​

What is true, however, is that in many cases it is necessary for many smaller deductions to be made in order for all of the evidence required to solve the mystery to be gathered. However, as the example from A Study in Scarlet demonstrates, even these smaller deductions can be based on a body of evidence and not just one clue in isolation.​

To reiterate my position, I’m treating having a required sequence of events as a “plot” even if the techniques allow different approaches to getting there. The “plot” is the required getting there. I’m also distinguishing from having placed the clues ahead of time versus saying things as the system requires. Justin appears to consider this an important distinction as well. The approach I’m using would not provide the kind of play he wants in a mystery scenario.

Note that in the case where I have a situation where I need facts to support deductions about what has happened, I would use the three clue rule. Early in my the campaign I’m running with my homebrew system, I had a scenario where the PCs were investigating the ruins of a town. A mage had taken up residence there to perform research, but she disappeared and a monster appeared in her place. I used the three clue rule to make sure that there was adequate evidence of what had happened. The PCs eventually figured it out and rescued the mage from her predicament. (Alas, I did not start posting recaps until much later in the campaign.)

In retrospect, I don’t know if I would prepare that scenario now the way I did early in the campaign. Applying the three clue rule robustly was a pain. I had to generate multiple sets of clues and weave them all together into the scenario in a way that made sense. At the time, I didn’t have a conflict resolution process. Checks were handled in a traditional way as pass or fail tests of a task’s success. Now that I have better tools for handling conflict resolution and managing who says, I am more inclined to specify the situation and lean more on the system to discover the clues in play instead of authoring them up front as part of the scenario design.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Well, what you are saying is that you don't know why some RPGers aren't interested in dealing with GM-driven scenarios. The answer, for my part, is fairly straightforward - I think player-driven RPGing is more engaging and more interesting, both for the players and for the GM.

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I just find the idea of a world in which nothing happens that is outside of the players' control so far beyond fantasy that I find it impossible to believe in. But D&D is all about impossible fantastic worlds, and I can understand why some people might want to play in a world like that - a world where they have total control and are not buffeted around by external events.

 

[pemerton]

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I just find the idea of a world in which nothing happens that is outside of the players' control so far beyond fantasy that I find it impossible to believe in. But D&D is all about impossible fantastic worlds, and I can understand why some people might want to play in a world like that - a world where they have total control and are not buffeted around by external events.

What you describe here has no connection at all to what I was talking about, which was building on @AbdulAlhazred's post that prompted your post to which I replied.

 

[kenada]

This dependence on random rolls seems weird to me. The party are attacked by an ogre whilst walking down the road. On the ogre is map showing the location of the bandit camp. Sure, sometimes random stuff happens, but more often things happen because something else happened to cause them. Shouldn't clues be hidden in locations where it is logical that they should be? Aside from logic, the players have a better chance of finding them that way.

It’s the way my homebrew system structures play to address the conflict of interest between GM-as-referee and GM-as-opposition. It’s something I’ve discussed here before, but it turns out that it’s not a new idea. Jon Peterson mentions in chapter 1 of The Elusive Shift how people saw it from the very beginning of the hobby (from The Elusive Shift chapter 1, “The Legacy of Wargaming”):

This necessarily brought the neutrality of the referee into doubt. In 1976, Kevin Slimak reaffirmed Phillies’s tenet that, “really, D&D is a game between the dungeonmasters and the players; they are the two sides. The dungeon designer sets the problems for his adventurers and they try to solve them.” But Slimak further recognized that this creates a peculiar conflict of interest for the referee: “Remember this when you run your game. You are playing with/against the adventurers, true, but you have ALL the advantages. If you use all these advantages, you’ll get those players, for SURE, but in the long run, you lose. Doing this will kill off your game for sure” (AW 3 (7)). This power imbalance would persuade many that D&D could not be played as a wargame and that it was instead the foundational entry in a new game category.​

Random events along with conflict resolution are one (but not the only) way for me to mediate between those two roles. One could say that my attempt at campaign as science experiment is actually reaching back to the hobby’s roots and trying to run it as a wargame, but I think that neglects the role that emergent story plays. The players are not just engaging in a freeform scenario. Their PCs are driving play, and the GM’s role is to support that (with conflict, dynamic events, etc).

Why do we want the the players to find the clues? Wouldn't it be more realistic if we just let them fail to find the whatever? The problem is, if the players fail to find the interesting stuff, they aint going to be having fun, and that's the bottom line of why they are playing.

Wanting them to find clues is what the three clue rule is about. I don’t actually want or care whether they discover the bandits, so I think we agree on that point. That’s the distinction I keep trying to make. If the system says, “tell the players about some danger nearby,” and that’s bandits, then I’m going to say something about nearby bandits. That’s different from the technique Justin is describing. He has a specific kind of play he wants to create that’s qualitatively different in his opinion.

What a weird thing to get hung up on.

Unless you're scripting exactly what happens, in what order, what the PCs must do at every stage, etc, your prep isn't a plot. Prepping a node-based adventure isn't prepping a plot. Prepping a mystery isn't prepping a plot.

If your prep is "monsters attack the village," that's not a plot.

If your prep is "monsters attack the village, the PCs stop them and take a few prisoners, the PCs interrogate the prisoners, the PCs find clues pointing to the monsters' lair, the PCs follow the clues to the monsters' lair, the PCs attack the gate and win, the PCs...," that's a plot.

In a thread about what Justin wrote, it’s difficult to have a conversation about it if we can’t even agree on the point he’s making.

"But Justin said..."

Well, add it to the long list of things he was wrong about.

Yes. He describes one thing, but the substance of the technique is doing something else. I think understanding that is important to understand how it is useful.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

In his view, a mystery requires having established facts the PCs discover and interpret. If you are creating them as you go, you are superficially following the structure of a mystery story while failing to create the experience of playing a mystery.

I agree with that. There is a lot written on why Murder Mystery novels are popular, but the pleasure of of finally discovering the Truth is one. And for discovering the Truth to be meaningful, there has to be a pre-existing Truth to discover.

 

[pemerton]

Note the commentary in number six. The problem is not that that GM has decided the PCs have to go to the central sanctuary of the temple. It’s that the techniques used to accomplish that goal are vulnerable to failure (unless the GM acts overtly to ensure the required event happens). If the PCs don’t question the survivor, they have no way of knowing where to go next. Justin suggests using the three clue rule to remove this failure point by providing redundancy.

<snip>

The issue I am identifying is that the solution being proposed is only changing how you arrive at those pre-determined events.

<snip>

To reiterate my position, I’m treating having a required sequence of events as a “plot” even if the techniques allow different approaches to getting there. The “plot” is the required getting there.

If I've understood, our views are the same. Here are some posts of mine, from 2011 and 2013, which (as best I can tell from the search function) are the earliest where I link The Alexandrian's "node-based design" to railroading:

I know of at least three ways to initiate the action in a fantasy RPG. (I'm sure there are others.)

<snip>

The second is that the players turn up to the first session, PCs generated, and the GM says "We're playing adventure X tonight". The very moderately stealth version of this goes ingame rather than metagame - the GM describes some event happening ingame which is the "plot hook", and the players do their duty and pick up on it.

This second approach is what I think is pretty typical for a published module or adventure path. I think it is prone to railroading - that depends in part on what options are open to the players in the course of the adventure, but often it seems to me that those options are not all that much. The players get to contribute a bit of colour and characterisation of their PCs, and perhaps the odd sidequest, but the bulk of the significant events that unfold in the campaign, the question of who enemies and allies are, and so on, are determined by the GM's selection of modules.

A more sophisticated version of this approach is what The Alexandrian calls node-based design - the idea that instead of the adventure involving a strictly linear series of events, the adventure is a bundle of nodes each containing leads to other nodes in the adventure, and the adventure is completed when all the nodes have been explored. The Alexandrian says this:

Of course, the argument can be made that there’s no “meaningful choice” here because there are three nodes in the scenario and the PCs are going to visit all three nodes no matter what they do. In the big picture, the exact order in which they visit those nodes isn’t meaningful.

Or is it?

... [snipping complexities like the possibility of a timeline that makes the sequence in which the nodes are explored more significant for the overall storyline]

in my opinion, the fact that the players are being offered the driver’s seat is meaningful in its own right. Even if the choice doesn’t have any lasting impact on the final conclusion of “good guys win, bad guys lose”, the fact that the players were the ones who decided how the good guys were going to win is important.​

The extent to which this is less railroady will turn quite a bit on how meaningful that "how" turns out to be. Merely killing the kobolds before the goblins - the "how" of mere sequence - doesn't seem that meaningful to me. If the players, by choosing the "how", can actually influence what is at stake - eg tackling the kobolds first will allow rescuing the prisoners, but leaves the village at the mercy of the goblins - then we are getting beyond colour and characterisation to more meaningful choices.

In a Living Campaign scenario of the sort Majoru Oakheart describes, or in a typical event-driven module, the decision about "which scene" is taken by the GM/module author. I personally don't like that sort of play, or AP play more generally, but if others do (and Paizo's sales suggest they do) then that's no skin off my nose!

<snip>

The Alexendrian, in his essays on "node-based design", argues that a multi-path adventure (whether the interlocking event nodes that he talks about, or a slightly more traditional dungeon with multiple viable pathways) means that "the players are being offered the driver's seat". In the examples he presents, however, the basic elements of all the scenes have been predetermined by the GM. The effect that the players have is (i) to change the sequence in which the scenes are framed, (ii) to determine, via the action resolution mechanics, the outcome of the scenes, and (iii) to affect, but in a micro- rather than a macro-way, the framing of later scenes by reference to the resolution of earlier scenes. What the Alexendrian doesn't discuss is the possibility that the resolution of an earlier scene might mean that some new scene hitherto unthought of by players or GM should be framed.

However railroady you think the Alexandrian's approach is (and he clearly thinks it isn't), I don't see that Majoru Oakheart is talking about anything significantly more railroady. For instance, nothing that Majoru has said precludes setting up the pre-authored events in a node style, or designing a dungeon with multiple pathways so that the players get to choose in what sequence they encounter the puzzles/traps/monsters.

There's a bit of under-statement in those posts - over time I've become more forthright in expressing my opinion about "node based design" and the "three clue rule". By 2016, I was putting it like this:

When I talk about player agency, I mean the ability of the player to shape (or "impact") the shared fiction. In some D&D games, the player has little such capacity - s/he can decide the feelings of his/her PC, and perhaps choose clothing, hair colour, etc, but the way the rest of the fiction unfolds is determined (either in advance, or in play) by the GM. (In the Alexandrian's node-based design variant of this, the player might get to decide the sequence in which a series of predetermined fictional events unfolds, and thereby perhaps change the peripheral colour of some of those events, while not changing their core content or significance.)

Anyway, as I said, I think we agree.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That’s different from the technique Justin is describing. He has a specific kind of play he wants to create that’s qualitatively different in his opinion.

Justin is giving advice, not dictating how it must be done. Advice is there to be listened to, considered, and as appropriate, ignored. Even though the guy has a bit of a messiah complex, it is not his intent to suggest that you must follow his rules at all times.

There are undoubtedly a great many ways to play D&D, and no advice is going to be appropriate for all of them.

As for his "three clue rule", it basically "no sh*t Sherlock"!

 

[Campbell]

Justin is giving advice, not dictating how it must be done. Advice is there to be listened to, considered, and as appropriate, ignored. Even though the guy has a bit of a messiah complex, it is not his intent to suggest that you must follow his rules at all times.

There are undoubtedly a great many ways to play D&D, and no advice is going to be appropriate for all of them.

Sure, but in no way does that address criticism of the technique from the perspective of don't prep plots - prep situations.