What is the point of GM's notes?

[Emerikol]

I do think a style of play is a series of choices. You can diverge into a different style by making a different choice. That some choices tend to synergize is also not a surprise but that isn't absolute.

1. Deep Prep - Lots of detail about the world done in advance.
2. Skilled Play - Players acting as characters need to make good strategic and tactical decisions for the group to succeed.
3. Sandbox - High player agency with a variety of options and not just one in a limited area of the world.
4. Living World - meaning the NPCs/Monsters change over time with and without PC stimuli.
5. The dice fall where they fall.

I could see changing any one of those without the others being that affected. I would say though that without prep, my concept of sandbox doesn't apply. If you don't do prep you are needing to limit your players to a sandbox. Plenty of DMs do everything static and get by without having a truly living world. Many DMs fudge dice but still have other choices in this list.

I would even go so far as to say that the ability and extent that non-GM players can create the fiction is a knob that you can turn up or down.

 

[Fenris-77]

The main point was a refutation of your claim that the 5MWD was not an issue in old school D&D. It was not to debate whether it remains an issue in 5e. Has it gotten worse? No.

And using resources to mitigate the 5MWD is hardly an original idea from either of us. There is a style of game that works whatever the version of D&D that mitigates the 5MWD. I had that style by default and I'm not sure I ever chose the style to specifically mitigate the 5MWD. I think I just thought that is what would happen in those types of situations so I played the monsters fairly.

I agree with whoever said that leaving a room is not like saving a game. That is a fundamental difference between a living breathing world and one that is not. Bad guys react. Good guys react. People engage events as they happen and people are making things happen to advance their personal agendas.

I think it's tough to argue that it hasn't gotten worse. The mechanics of the game mitigate for it more than they used to because of the preponderance of per day abilities across classes, as well as the synergy of nova-type approaches to encounters. Both are far easier and more common in 5E.

As for style, that's certainly true. Some groups, and lets stick to 1E and earlier since that was my initial example pool, really hand wave rations and torches and darkvision and stuff like that. Nothing wrong with that, other than that it encourages the 5MWD approach barring other constraints and consequences. Or things like horses and ponies to carry food and water. Where are they while you're in the dungeon? Does anything ever happen to them while no one is watching? Do you have retainers minding the fort? Enforcing encumbrance and physical resource management is key factor in skilled play, which was the default style at the time, or at least the one that the actual game rules supported.

@Maxperson - Create Food and Water is certainly a way around having to carry food, but the opportunity cost is high. It's a 3rd level spell and it only feeds three people. So you're using rations or your casting it twice. Either way it's not exactly an easy answer until much higher levels when that 3rd level slot is less important. As for continual light on coins, yeah, that was quite common. Even that isn't quite the cure all it sounds like if people are forced to hold them, possibly at the cost of a readied weapon, and/or are forced to drop them in order to cast or ready a weapon. It depends on how the DM was running it.

 

[Ovinomancer]

When the thread goes towards deep analysis of how play works, some posters decry this, saying you can't treat RPGs as a science.

When the thread talks about aethetics of play instead, this same group decries it, saying you can't treat RPGs as art!

Oh, and I see the dictionary has been broken out, yay.

 

[Maxperson]

@Maxperson - Create Food and Water is certainly a way around having to carry food, but the opportunity cost is high. It's a 3rd level spell and it only feeds three people. So you're using rations or your casting it twice. Either way it's not exactly an easy answer until much higher levels when that 3rd level slot is less important. As for continual light on coins, yeah, that was quite common. Even that isn't quite the cure all it sounds like if people are forced to hold them, possibly at the cost of a readied weapon, and/or are forced to drop them in order to cast or ready a weapon. It depends on how the DM was running it.

"Explanation/Description: When this spell is cast, the cleric causes food and/or water to appear. The food thus created is highly nourishing, and
each cubic foot of the material will sustain three human-sized creatures or one horse-sized creature for a full day. For each level of experience the cleric has attained, 1 cubic foot of food and/or water is created by the spell, i.e. 2 cubic feet of food are created by a 2nd level cleric, 3 by a 3rd, 4 by a 4th, and so on; or the 2nd level cleric could create 1 cubic foot of food and 1 cubic foot of water, etc."

A 5th level cleric can provide food for 6 people and water for 9(2 cubic feet of food and 3 of water) or food for 9 and water for 6. You can fully feed and provide water for a party of 6 or less from the moment you learn the spell.

 

[Maxperson]

When the thread goes towards deep analysis of how play works, some posters decry this, saying you can't treat RPGs as a science.

When the thread talks about aethetics of play instead, this same group decries it, saying you can't treat RPGs as art!

Oh, and I see the dictionary has been broken out, yay.

It's a bit of both, really. There are methods and processes, as well as creativity. The problem is that one side(not mine) seem to be trying to make it all one or the other in their arguments.

 

[Aldarc]

When the thread goes towards deep analysis of how play works, some posters decry this, saying you can't treat RPGs as a science.

When the thread talks about aethetics of play instead, this same group decries it, saying you can't treat RPGs as art!

Not to mention the number of people who hate being reminded that their TTRPG is a game and dislike when it's discussed as a game designed for recreational purposes.

Oh, and I see the dictionary has been broken out, yay.

That was my own fault. I was hoping to show how the term "aesthetic" overlaps with Bedrockgames's own description of "living world" play.

 

[Emerikol]

I think it's tough to argue that it hasn't gotten worse. The mechanics of the game mitigate for it more than they used to because of the preponderance of per day abilities across classes, as well as the synergy of nova-type approaches to encounters. Both are far easier and more common in 5E.

I would argue that the growth of at-will powers and the general nerfing of wizards over time would have lessened it not increased it.

As for style, that's certainly true. Some groups, and lets stick to 1E and earlier since that was my initial example pool, really hand wave rations and torches and darkvision and stuff like that. Nothing wrong with that, other than that it encourages the 5MWD approach barring other constraints and consequences. Or things like horses and ponies to carry food and water. Where are they while you're in the dungeon? Does anything ever happen to them while no one is watching? Do you have retainers minding the fort? Enforcing encumbrance and physical resource management is key factor in skilled play, which was the default style at the time, or at least the one that the actual game rules supported.

I would agree that some form of skilled play was the default but I'm not sure resource management was the fix most DMs chose for their games. A lot of hand waving going on is what I'm saying. There are a host of other differences.

 

[Bedrockgames]

It's a bit of both, really. There are methods and processes, as well as creativity. The problem is that one side(not mine) seem to be trying to make it all one or the other in their arguments.

Where I am getting lost is on how some of these terms are being used. I feel like I have been responding to posts, but with each response its like I can't win because I am told now I need to talk about aesthetics, or now I need to talk about something else (even though I think I am talking about that). Again, maybe the issue is they are using terms here rather specifically and I don't share the vocabulary they bring to design. But I think that is part of the problem in these analysis threads. Honestly at this point I am not even sure what is being debated. At one stage I thought the viability of living world was being challenged, then it seems it isn't it is just being categorized differently. I don't know. My view this whole time has simply been, "playing to discover the GM's notes" fails to capture the range of what is going on in a living sandbox. And then I tried to provide explanations and example, and techniques and methods for running living world when asked. I think there was and remains some dispute over the nature of a living world (in terms of where the living world itself resides: if it can be likened to a model if is just this amorphous thing that only really takes shape when the GM describes things to players, etc). I think that is a longer discussion, there was probably a lot of talking past one another.

 

[Bedrockgames]

4. Living World - meaning the NPCs/Monsters change over time with and without PC stimuli.

I would quibble and say this only captures the macro scale: in a living world you also have NPCs/monsters/groups who are responding directly to what the players do. I think one of the misconceptions created about a living world is it is a kind of terrarium where the players don't matter, but this is really the ground level of living world where players are likely to experience it first hand (at the scale of the individual NPC whose goals and interests intersect in some way with their own).

 

[uzirath]

Last night I ran a GURPS game and had a situation where my notes ended up being less useful than I had hoped. The group had just begun exploring the ancient vaults of a long-dead dragon. It's a relatively traditional dungeon crawl. I focused my "notes" on preparation for a few combat encounters and a trap. I underestimated the amount of time I needed to spend getting the maps set up for the VTT. The one thing I had left on my prep list was thinking through two role-playing encounters with undead spirits. But, time was up so we played the game.

The combat prep material was very helpful. A big battle early on was fast-paced and rewarding, partly because I had reviewed the relevant rules in advance and anticipated some likely questions. When the first role-playing encounter came along, I found myself stumbling a bit. I felt like it would have gone better if I had curtailed the VTT prep and spent a bit more time considering who this person was and what she wanted. As it was, it was acceptable but clunky.

In the terms of this discussion, which I have been attempting to loosely follow in my spare time, I think it is clear that the function of my notes is to contain material that the players will discover through play. Though I initially found the phrase "playing to find out what's in the GM's notes" a bit reductive, I've mostly come to terms with it. I also think of the game world as a "living world" in the sense that I try to portray a sense that the world is larger than the bits that the PCs are engaged with and that PC action (or inaction) will cause ripples that have consequences.

I don't believe, however, that anything is "real" until it actually enters the played fiction. In other words, nothing in my notes is "fixed" until the players have experienced it. If I change it up during play (or, as sometimes happens, forget what was in my notes), I go with the logic of how things played out. The players add elements to the fiction that I hadn't anticipated. Also, they sometimes come up with connections and ideas that were better (more dramatic, more fun, more connected to the characters...) than what I had in my notes. In which case, I always toss my notes.