What does it mean to "Challenge the Character"?

[iserith]

That said, I'm pretty loose with player introductions in 5e because I strive to use my GM "no" as rarely as possible. Still, there's a limit in play and an understanding at our table because there are no mechanics available to resolve a conflict.

I advise the players to keep everything in terms of an action declaration as that is what I'm on the lookout for since that is when I have to adjudicate. I even discourage asking questions of the DM, if those questions can be answered by taking action in the game world. "How many doors are in this room?" is better stated as "I look to see how many doors there are in this room..." in my view. The stop-n-chat with the DM interferes with the flow of the game in my view, plus questions are often a form of out-of-game risk mitigation as the players fish for the best solution.

Anyway, I also follow the general concept that if it wasn't introduced in play then it doesn't exist and I have the option of adding it right now as long as it doesn't contradict some previously established fiction. So if a player says something like "I look around for someone I know among the guards..." and based on everything we know about the character, the setting, and what has come before points to that being reasonable, then I might say that's the case and, sure enough, ol' Frances just happens to be on duty. If it doesn't make much sense for that to be true, then nobody the character knows is on duty.

 

[Oofta]

Now i need to find a punch bowl.

A gnome punchbowl perhaps?

 

[Guest 6801328]

To me there's a big difference between "I have contacts in the city, does Bob happen to be one of the guards on duty?" and "I have contacts in the city, in fact Bob is captain of the guard so of course he'll let us in."

The former is establishing a background and history (even if it wasn't explicitly written) but the latter is altering the game world beyond what the PC could do.

Yes, I agree. Although the latter scenario could work as a roll-then-narrate thing:

Player: "I have contacts in the city; I'll approach the guards and see if any of them know me and will let me in if I promise to keep it quiet."
DM: "Even if you know them it's still going to to take some talking. Sounds like you're using Persuasion, so let me have a roll."
Player: "17."
DM: "Yeah, one of them knows you, and he tells his mate that you're ok."
Player: "Sweet. That's Bob. Before he became a guard he used to hang out at the tavern where I performed, and after hours we were drinking buddies."

I'd be ok with that. In fact I encourage that sort of thing. The player has participated in world-building without changing the game state to gain advantage, and maybe even has given me some hooks for the future. ("Oh, he used to perform regularly in a particular tavern? And stayed late drinking with some of the patrons? Duly noted...")

 

[Guest 6801328]

I advise the players to keep everything in terms of an action declaration as that is what I'm on the lookout for since that is when I have to adjudicate. I even discourage asking questions of the DM, if those questions can be answered by taking action in the game world. "How many doors are in this room?" is better stated as "I look to see how many doors there are in this room..." in my view. The stop-n-chat with the DM interferes with the flow of the game in my view, plus questions are often a form of out-of-game risk mitigation as the players fish for the best solution.

I think it's also good to just develop the habit of engaging in particular way. The answer to "what's wrong with just saying 'I roll Skill X' when it's obvious?" is the same as the answer to "What's wrong with not using my turn signal when there's nobody there?"

 

[Celebrim]

As for me takingbyime to "take note" of what you didn't say... why in the world would I try and note all the things you didnt say?

Because you seem quite happy to invent things for me to say when it suits your purposes.

You can assume whatever you like about other games, but for me, I have seem plenty of conflicts in games without authorship by players.

Is that really all you got out of that? I even called out that the sort of conflicts that I was talking about were not merely the sort that comes from players acting immaturely or having poor social skills, and yet here we are.

As for you wanting to keep focusing on your choices in the "RPG or not" test, that's fine and dandy. I hope it yields for you some useful or beneficial results. For me, worrying over whether or not someone else's style if play "counts as an RPG in my eyes" is a pursuit with no payoff at the end.

Style of play? I'm not quibbling over styles of play.

Objectively, there are things that are RPGs and things that are not. That has nothing to do with a "style of play". I personally find questions like: "Is "Cops & Robbers" and RPG?", "If it is not an RPG, what is it?", and "If it isn't an RPG, what minimal set of changes would it require to make it an RPG?" interesting and informative to ponder. I'm not asserting you can change "Cops & Robbers" to an RPG just by a change in style of play (although if you could, that would be interesting).

is ticking off somebody else if they for dome reason give a whit what I think.

I'm seeing well where this is going...

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Guest 6801328]

I mean ... it's hard to argue with "gnome" and "punch" in the same sentence......

As in, "I'd like to punt that gnome into the punch bowl."

Or "punch 'im roight in the bowls"

 

[Ovinomancer]

This is interesting and really worthy of its own thread, about the burdens (or otherwise) of GMing.

Well, it started by just following some thoughts where they took me.

But one place they ended up taking me is that I think some of the constraints/rules that are being taken for granted in the 5e context aren't actually found in the rules but are imported from some more generic conception of RPGing.

To elaborate: in one of these recent threads, someone posted about GMing a couple of kids. Kid A, in character, tells Kid B (also in character) to scout ahead. B does so. A asks "What was up ahead?" B starts answering, without waiting to be told by the GM. And it's not only kids - the last time I introduced a new player to RPGing, he took for granted that he had a fair bit of liberty to establish context, background etc for his PC.

If all I know of RPGing is the 5e Basic PDF, I don't think I can fully work out how I'm meant to create and play a character like Tika Wayland, who (as advertised in the sidebars) has friends who care for her, a history and a home. The example of play - scoping out the gargoyles - gives some sort of indication that establishing the context is the GM's role. But the stuff in ch 4 strongly implies that establishing PC backstory is the player's role. I don't see much advice in the Basic rules on how to handle the interaction of these two things, and frankly it would just seem weird to be "playing my character" and yet to be having the GM tell me all about my intimate connections to the various NPCs I'm meeting, what our shared memories are, etc. Those look like player-side, not GM-side, elements of the fiction.

And so I guess I feel that, once it comes to light in this way that the game is in fact assuming people can bring some externally-generated expectation to bear on managing this aspect of it, then the claim that certain approaches are notably more consistent with the game taken on its own terms starts to look a bit weaker. To use a metaphor: if everyone has a bump in their rug, I find the claim to have identified the canonical floor covering a bit less persuasive than it might otherwise have been.

(Postscript: if everyone is playing "Man with no name" type characters; or characters whose backstory is all in the past, and/or somewhere else, and so not apt to actually come up in play; then the issue won't arise. But I don't think the 5e Basic PDF tells me that that's the sort of character I should create, or the sort of play experience I should expect. In fact, chapter 4 tends to suggest quite the opposite. Although maybe this is a case like the Foreword to Moldvay Basic, where the game text suggests one thing, but in its implementation very clearly delivers a different thing. But I don't see much account in 5e postings of playing "situated" characters, and how that works.)

I addressed this issue in the parts if the post you snipped.

Fundamentally, there's a scope difference between introducing off-screen fiction (Uncle Bob told me about trolls) and establishing fiction present in the current scene. As I said in the various MMI threads, 5e is a GM-authority-centered game. As such, introduction of fiction into a scene is the GM's authority, not the player's. The player can leverage backstory (even on the spot created backstory) in an action declaration, but can't add to the fiction without GM approval.

This is the default -- it can be abridged in various ways but care needs to taken because the system doesn't directly support it. As I've said, I'm comfortable enough with the system to relax this a bit in my games.

As for playing a centered in the fiction character, no, 5e doesn't do this in the way I've come to understand your meaning. Or, more precisely, it does this as much as the GM allows, which is also not tge way I understand your point.

This probably could have been in the same post as just upthread, but I didn't think of it first time round.

Couldn't my example be done as a CHA check? With success/failure narrated along the lines you sketched upthread - success is fond memories and letting the PCs through; failure is either mistaken identity, or what about my poker money, etc.

Is the (or one) issue that it might be hard to set a proper DC? I'll admit I haven't thought that through, but it doesn't seem too big a hurdle.

I'll agree that table dynamics can get strained if the players push too hard in establishing fiction, but the same is true if the GM does: "rocks fall" is obviously at the absurd end, but I think most of us have heard stories of, and at least in my own case I've experienced multiple instances of, games failing because GMs couldn't get player buy in for the fiction they wanted to establish. In the player case just as in the GM case, I feel that this is something that robust table relationships should be able to handle.

And to respond to a possible question, namley, why bother, that is, why not just declare that the PC talks to the guard without adding in the extra fiction? For me, a major reason is that the tendency towards a lack of PC situatedness is in my view one of the suckiest tendencies in D&D. REH did it in his Conan stories for particular narrative reasons, but making it ubiquitous is something I really don't like. Oriental Adventures tried to tackle this in the mid-80s, and I'd like to think that D&D has made some progress in this regard in the intervening 30-odd years.

What in the fiction lets me, as GM, know how difficult this task will be? I don't see anything, which makes any DC set entirely arbitrary -- it can't be grounded in either mechanics or the fiction. This is the first problem.

The second is how skill bonuses work. Doing this would priviledge classes that have Expertise mechanics, and esoecially a Rogue at 11+ level as Reliable Talent means minimum roll for any proficient skill is 10. A not optimized rogue at 11th level will automatically succeed at any of their Expertise skills (3 or 4) for any easy, moderate, or hard tasks. A optimised Fighter at any one of those skills can autosucceed at easy tasks, but has a 25% chance to fail moderate and a 50% to fail hard DCs. Obviously, if we're talking about introduction of challenge solving fiction this kind of success rate is unacceptable, not to mention the class disparities.

The system will actively fight this kind of play.

 

[Celebrim]

I advise the players to keep everything in terms of an action declaration as that is what I'm on the lookout for since that is when I have to adjudicate. I even discourage asking questions of the DM, if those questions can be answered by taking action in the game world. "How many doors are in this room?" is better stated as "I look to see how many doors there are in this room..." in my view. The stop-n-chat with the DM interferes with the flow of the game in my view, plus questions are often a form of out-of-game risk mitigation as the players fish for the best solution.

Now that is fascinating. Backing up a bit, one of my big obsessions in RP theory is the notion of a propositional filter. That is to say, what propositions does the GM recognize as valid propositions which then require him to come up with some sort of resolution, and what propositions the GM rejects as invalid that need to be stated in a different manner. It's my theory, and this is a big part of "Celebrim's Second Law of RPGs", that the proposition filter has the single biggest impact on the process of play - even more so than the rules of the system. Further, in traditional RPGs such as AD&D, the proposition filter is generally not explicitly defined. The writer of the system assumes the filter without actually stating what it is. It's something that's some essential to the act of RPing that for the longest time, it was just overlooked without much thinking about it.

The fact that D&D and it's descendants do not specify its proposition filter is one of the reasons that with the exact same rules set, two groups that are "playing D&D" can be playing entirely different games. It's also one of the big problems that 4e D&D ran into, is that 4e subtly started specifying its proposition filter, with the result that tables that had a well defined proposition filter and process of play, if it wasn't compatible with the 4e filter, and if they weren't willing to adapt 4e to their process of play or adapt their process of play to 4e, started saying things like, "This isn't even an RPG." In their mind, all RPGs had a single proposition filter - that's how they'd always played - and a table with a different proposition filter is going to seem weird. Like really weird.

What you are describing here is that your proposition filter is tuned to reject anything I earlier defined as a "call". All propositions must take the form of a proposition. And that's a really pure and interesting stance. I'm inclined to like it, particularly since you are right that many calls take the form of interacting with the metagame rather than interacting with the game, and that often leads to dysfunctional processes of play, like as you call out "fishing for the best solution" (which is essentially attempting a bunch of do overs until you reach a trial and error solution without paying for the consequences of the failures). I don't think I'd ever go completely purist with that approach, but I do like the thinking behind it.

 

[iserith]

Now that is fascinating. Backing up a bit, one of my big obsessions in RP theory is the notion of a propositional filter. That is to say, what propositions does the GM recognize as valid propositions which then require him to come up with some sort of resolution, and what propositions the GM rejects as invalid that need to be stated in a different manner. It's my theory, and this is a big part of "Celebrim's Second Law of RPGs", that the proposition filter has the single biggest impact on the process of play - even more so than the rules of the system. Further, in traditional RPGs such as AD&D, the proposition filter is generally not explicitly defined. The writer of the system assumes the filter without actually stating what it is. It's something that's some essential to the act of RPing that for the longest time, it was just overlooked without much thinking about it.

The fact that D&D and it's descendants do not specify its proposition filter is one of the reasons that with the exact same rules set, two groups that are "playing D&D" can be playing entirely different games. It's also one of the big problems that 4e D&D ran into, is that 4e subtly started specifying its proposition filter, with the result that tables that had a well defined proposition filter and process of play, if it wasn't compatible with the 4e filter, and if they weren't willing to adapt 4e to their process of play or adapt their process of play to 4e, started saying things like, "This isn't even an RPG." In their mind, all RPGs had a single proposition filter - that's how they'd always played - and a table with a different proposition filter is going to seem weird. Like really weird.

What you are describing here is that your proposition filter is tuned to reject anything I earlier defined as a "call". All propositions must take the form of a proposition. And that's a really pure and interesting stance. I'm inclined to like it, particularly since you are right that many calls take the form of interacting with the metagame rather than interacting with the game, and that often leads to dysfunctional processes of play, like as you call out "fishing for the best solution" (which is essentially attempting a bunch of do overs until you reach a trial and error solution without paying for the consequences of the failures). I don't think I'd ever go completely purist with that approach, but I do like the thinking behind it.

Now here's the part that bakes some folks' noodles: If we're playing Dungeon World, ask all the questions you want. Even some of the moves are questions. That's all good. The game expects it and so do I.

But if we're playing D&D 5e, keep it in the form of an action declaration please! I'm not going to engage in the mini-game of players asking 20 questions before they take an action. The thing with questions in this context is that questions don't have consequences whereas actions might. So it's no wonder that most games I see have players asking questions to try to mitigate the difficulty of the challenge without taking any risks in the effort of that mitigation!