What is the point of GM's notes?

[Manbearcat]

How do you decide which actions invoke a "living, breathing world" and thus produce "natural" consequences and which do not? Is this a function of the GM deciding? Is the GM more "natural" a force in the game than the other players?

The first paragraph ( (a) - (d) aspect) and the downstream consequences of my above post is relevant here:

<GM> action resolution mediation could be (a) extrapolation based on naturalistic, causal logic...it could be (b) genre logic...it could be (c) some "rule of cool/storytelling impetus"...it could be some (d) indecipherable alchemy of 2 or all 3 of the above.

GM says yes?

GM says no?

GM says roll the dice but due to their heavy mediation requirements, my chances of realizing my intent could be 50 % likely or 150 % more likely at 75 % (because GM a might choose Hard DC while the next might feel its a Really Hard DC)? And what if my PC doesn't have the ability to martial resources to overwrite/influence/control that 25 % spread (like the aforementioned Diviner's Portent)?

My volitional capacity in this situation may actually be lost. Or, simply because of the lack of certitude that comes with structural reification (and the fact that the lack of GM constraint + lack of table-facing machinery is the volitional force here), it may actually be there, but it may just feel like it isn't there.

It is a tricky pickle which is made profoundly worse by the deep fallibility of human Perception Error and Perception Bias. A player may feel like they were Deprotagonized in just such a situation before...maybe a few times. When in reality, they were not...but now they're working off of tainted priors so their working model for what is happening is askew!

When 5e initially came out, I had a hugely prolific and revealing (as to the dizzying application of the (a) - (d) matrix above by GMs on a case by case basis...which led to the absolute absence of mediation consensus on pretty much every scenario we talked about...which tells you there wasn't a "inferable by first principles" or intuitive thing happening under the hood) post entitled DC 30 or DC 35? I think a lot of people here engaged with that. It was enormously instructive. Unfortunately, the forum ate it.

And it wasn't just the all over the map collage of (a) - (d) matrix deployment above as the process to arrive at DCs...but it was the significant discrepancy in DC handling period (when you consider stepping up or stepping back a DC creates a 25 % spread on action resolution results!)!

The saving grace that people will rely upon is the accretion of data over the course of years of play under a GM. This will help to normalize the process of DC adjudication and the output of that adjudication. But it will never ensure it and outright remove the incidence of action resolution events that feel "Deprotagonizing." Going from 5 times per session out of 50 moments of action resolution is only a 10 % incidence of feeling/being "Deprotagonized." Reducing that to only 1 per session is a dramatic improvement. But 1 is not nothing and due to the way human's catalogue "losses" vs "wins", even that 1 incidence will have a disproportionate impact cognitively and emotionally on the player involved.

Its a greater than Herculean effort to reduce those incidences to 0...I'm not sure its possible.

 

[Manbearcat]

It's all natural. As long as what comes makes sense(as may be expected), it's a natural consequence, even if 5 DMs would come up with 5 different things that make sense. The DM is greatly constrained by gameplay(the players) and the social contract not to just act on whim, but with fairness and deliberation to come up with a natural progression for actions.

nat·u·ral·ly

1. without special help or intervention; in a natural manner.

2. as may be expected; of course.

What do you think about what I've written above (and below).

What if a player is at your table and your process is opaque with them ("are you one part causal logic, one part genre logic, 2 parts "rule of cool/story" here?...or does causal logic hold considerably more weight...and why are you doing this formulation now vs this other time when you did this other formulation?") or it doesn't synchronize with them cognitively even if you articulate it to them ("I just don't understand why you aren't heavily weighting genre and 'rule of cool' story in this scenario...why are you weighting causal logic almost exclusively here?").

Now their mental model spits out "not as expected" rather than "as may be expected." And the problem with spitting out "not as expected" is as I put above...even if its a vanishingly small number of incidences per play session, that incident will be disproportionately impactful due to the way our brains catalogue events (athletes deeply remember their losses with their wins rabbit holed, relationships fail because a mate forgets/undervalues the 500 times you were kind/thoughtful/caring/sacrificing and the singular stain of thoughtless/selfish burns so bright).

 

[darkbard]

It's all natural. As long as what comes makes sense(as may be expected), it's a natural consequence, even if 5 DMs would come up with 5 different things that make sense. The DM is greatly constrained by gameplay(the players) and the social contract not to just act on whim, but with fairness and deliberation to come up with a natural progression for actions.

nat·u·ral·ly

1. without special help or intervention; in a natural manner.

2. as may be expected; of course.

That use of the word ("It's all natural") is so broad as to be meaningless.

And why did you switch my adjective to your adverbial form?

Natural
adjective
1.
existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind
2.
of or in agreement with the character or makeup of, or circumstances surrounding, someone or something.

It was pretty clear in my posts that I was using the word in its bolded adjectival meaning above. But even assuming definition two above, who decides whether something is in agreement with circumstances, etc? How do the players and social contract constrain the GM, specifically?

 

[prabe]

What do you think about what I've written below.

What if a player is at your table and your process is opaque with them ("are you one part causal logic, one part genre logic, 2 parts "rule of cool/story" here?...or does causal logic hold considerably more weight...and why are you doing this formulation now vs this other time when you did this other formulation?") or it doesn't synchronize with them cognitively even if you articulate it to them ("I just don't understand why you aren't heavily weighting genre and 'rule of cool' story in this scenario...which are you weighting causal logic almost exclusively here?").

Now their mental model spits out "not as expected" rather than "as may be expected." And the problem with spitting out "not as expected" is as I put above...even if its a vanishingly small number of incidences per play session, that incident will be disproportionately impactful due to the way our brains categorize events (athletes deeply remember their losses, relationships fail because a mate forgets/undervalues the 500 times you were kind/thoughtful/caring/sacrificing and the singular stain of thoughtless/selfish burns so bright).

I think @Maxperson at this point runs exclusively for long-time friends (please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) so this might be distant from his recent experience. I would be willing to see his response, though.

Me? I started both of my 5E campaigns in local game stores (different ones, because reasons) because a) I kinda prefer larger parties and b) I wanted to stretch my comfort zone some/meet new people. One campaign has three of six players new to me, the other has two of five. That I can tell, there hasn't been any of the kind of reaction you describe in either campaign, from the new-to-me players or the ones who've known me for 15-20+ years. Two of the players in the first campaign were new to playing D&D, and both of them have moved on to do some DMing (something I'm really happy about).

If a decision disconcerted a player in the way you describe, as badly as you describe, I'd really want to talk to the player offline and figure out where the disconnect was. If I couldn't get them to grok the decision, maybe I could still convince them of my good faith and intentions. FWIW, the players I have seem to trust me on that ...

The only times I've felt deprotagonized at a player has been while playing published adventures, because they're not written to take into account any given players or their characters.

 

[prabe]

How do the players and social contract constrain the GM, specifically?

I can think of a number of ways:

I have less fun at the table if the players have less fun--even without the threat of players leaving. The dead silence of a table where no one is having fun is a nightmare.

The easiest way to keep the players engaged is to make their suspension of disbelief as easy as possible, to make it easy for them to conspire with me to keep the story believable. So, prior events absolutely serve as a constraint on me as the GM, both for narrative consistency and for ... judicial consistency, I guess (ruling the same way). While I don't think of GMing as being a perfect parallel to writing fiction, it's not unlike a writer of fiction wanting to maintain consistency and continuity over the course of a story.

The players who have given me information about their characters, have given me ways to tie their characters to the setting and to the campaign. If someone tells me, "My character's lover disappeared, and I want to find them," they've told me something about a kind of story they want to have emerge during play; if I want to keep that player engaged, I'd do well to have that at least as a repeating thread--and it seems like a good idea to have that resolve during play (in the instance I'm thinking of, the player has said he doesn't think the character would keep adventuring after finding her lover, so it either needs to be at the end of the campaign, or we need to work on a replacement character).

The players have signed up for a game where their characters are the protagonists. That is a constraint on the scenes and story-threads I frame in. The players have an expectation of fair play. That is absolutely a constraint on me. I think the fact some GMs act as though those aren't constraints is unfortunate--the horror stories are real, and they shouldn't happen ever.

As you might guess, I feel quite constrained as a GM, even in a system like D&D 5E that really doesn't mechanically restrict my options much.

 

[Manbearcat]

I can think of a number of ways:

I have less fun at the table if the players have less fun--even without the threat of players leaving. The dead silence of a table where no one is having fun is a nightmare.

The easiest way to keep the players engaged is to make their suspension of disbelief as easy as possible, to make it easy for them to conspire with me to keep the story believable. So, prior events absolutely serve as a constraint on me as the GM, both for narrative consistency and for ... judicial consistency, I guess (ruling the same way). While I don't think of GMing as being a perfect parallel to writing fiction, it's not unlike a writer of fiction wanting to maintain consistency and continuity over the course of a story.

The players who have given me information about their characters, have given me ways to tie their characters to the setting and to the campaign. If someone tells me, "My character's lover disappeared, and I want to find them," they've told me something about a kind of story they want to have emerge during play; if I want to keep that player engaged, I'd do well to have that at least as a repeating thread--and it seems like a good idea to have that resolve during play (in the instance I'm thinking of, the player has said he doesn't think the character would keep adventuring after finding her lover, so it either needs to be at the end of the campaign, or we need to work on a replacement character).

The players have signed up for a game where their characters are the protagonists. That is a constraint on the scenes and story-threads I frame in. The players have an expectation of fair play. That is absolutely a constraint on me. I think the fact some GMs act as though those aren't constraints is unfortunate--the horror stories are real, and they shouldn't happen ever.

As you might guess, I feel quite constrained as a GM, even in a system like D&D 5E that really doesn't mechanically restrict my options much.

This all looks good to me.

Very good post and I agree with it. You're talking about play moving toward the optimum possible for 5e (harken back to my 4 continuums of Protagonism upthread).

However, I think you're post directly above this more answers @darkbard 's question than this one because I think (and he can correct me if I'm wrong), his question was about constraint in action resolution mediation specifically (not protagonism broadly).

So your answer to his question would be "synchronicity at the social contract level" (which is what I was intimating prior).

Its a fine answer (its "the" answer really).

I would say where the problem lies is the fact that "synchronicity at the social contract level" is an alchemy that is not reproducible on any mass level (otherwise we wouldn't have had the extraordinarily discordant output in the thread I mentioned and we wouldn't constantly be besieged by anecdote after anecdote of similar discordance on TTRPG boards...and in real life). Because alchemy like this isn't reproducible and is inherently volatile (you can have it and "poof" its gone because of a series of action resolution issues), it cannot serve to mollify someone who is looking for an answer from first principles that is stable and reproducible.

So, for instance, if someone simply told me:

"We're going to give you a panel of 10 GMs who are going to observe and peer review your 5e, level 15 game action resolution mediation for 10 sessions, and give you a grade A - F."

The LAST thing I would say is (and you're talking about someone who is extremely confident in their ability to adjudicate games) "yeah, we can just go ahead and forgo this whole thing...its a 100 %."

I would probably say "if I get north of a B-, I'll be VERY surprised."

And to me...B- is a failing grade. Because what that means is that I've had an enormous number of peer reviewers disagree with incidence of action resolution which would then aggregate into a hefty number.

So, the reality is, the alchemy of social contract at any given table relies upon several factors that go way beyond the competence and cognitive synchronicity of the participants at the table (eg - deference to perceived authority, respect for you, manners, no-effs really to give, conflict-averse personality, a hill one isn't willing to die on).

So I look at 2 realities conjoined here and what the implications one must draw from it:

1) There is a 0 % chance that any 5e GM in my theoretical peer review scenario above is going to achieve anything approaching 100 %...again, I'm way more competent than most and I put my median for any given set of reviewers at around a B-.

2) Social contract alchemy is x degree (with x not being an insignificant value) reliant upon "extra-competency and extra-synchronicity" factors and sussing out even the qualitative (forget quantitative) signature for any given table would require a major research project and neuroimaging equipment (and likely significant uncertainty in the findings still).

The only implications from the marriage of those two above and your persistent action resolution harmony at your table is "prabe is a good 5e GM and his alchemy with his players works."

That is a statement that all GMs should hope for as a broad statement of their play. But using it as a proxy for "a 5e GM self-constraining via extra-game principles smuggled in so that they can limbo well under their mandate + action resolution procedures can reliably achieve table-synchronous action resolution across any four 5e players (who are not inherently dysfunctional or combative)" is extremely fraught.

But honestly, that is intentful design. That is a feature, not a bug. The designers willfully designed in heterogeneity across the population of all 5e tables; "Rulings not rules, natural language, make the game your own, and find your own alchemy." But it doesn't stand up that you can reverse engineer that design intent to say that your "found alchemy" is reproducible at scale because "competent GM + intentfully designed cross-table heterogeneity." I'm not saying you're saying that, but if that is the implication, it can't stand up. I'm sure there are stray anecdotes of relative "Edens of 5e Protagonistic Play" sprinkled about the "5e-osphere" (like yours). But if its happening at scale, (a) its happening quietly and (b) all of the noise that says it isn't is somehow just a flukily robust noise masquerading as signal. Further (and again), where the anecdotes do exist, there is a lot of "extra-synchronicity" stuff that are consequential aspects of that alchemy (when it comes to action resolution mediation specifically).

Man, that is a lot of crap I just wrote. I hope that makes sense.

 

[Manbearcat]

One final bit.

I think the sell is particularly impossible to me because I've interacted with so many tenured GMs on here who (with all the respect in the world I can muster) aren't remotely sufficiently informed about the prospects of dozens and dozens of physical tasks in our own world, let alone a fantasy world where a Fighter is routinely somehow dealing with otherworldly kinetic energy deficits (some just beyond comprehension like wading into melee with an Ancient Red Wyrm) that our real life athletes couldn't even dream of dealing with.

I'm a totally average Lead Climber and Boulderer. Average as hell.

But I would guarantee that a large cross-section of competent 5e GMs would look at a boulder problem and give me a DC that in no way reflects what it should be (either subjectively for me * or objectively against all of the world). I'd look at a Tier 3 problem and, depending deeply on the dynamics of the climb, I could be anywhere from "no...I cannot climb this obstacle" to "this is a joke." And they wouldn't know how to adjudicate that.

And again, I'm a nothingburger, 43 year old, extremely amateur climber with a legion of injuries from 30+ years in hard athletics. Compared to some of the freakishly power: weight ratio, +8 Ape-Index, 20 year old climbers (and these are WELL within the normal distribution of just competent climbers), I may as well be strapped to a gurney and catatonic. Most GMs would look at some of these climbs and they would just flat say "no...no chance" to the Fighter who wanted to climb it (with full marks for irony, the same badass Fighter that just whooped an Ancient Red Wyrm in melee!). A few may say "DC 30." Yet, I see a huge regime of kids routinely pull off these climbs!

I'm just enormously skeptical (and rightly so) of damn near every GM I've encountered on ENWorld being able to consistently synchronize with me on a DC in my head when I conceive of a physical obstacle/feat of athleticism.

Oh and that * is a HUGE (e) which I forgot in my matrix above. Is a GM setting their DC based on the target attempting it (subjective DC) or is it an objective DC based on the obstacle itself? In that thread in 2016, it was not only all over the map on a per person basis...each individual GM would toggle subjective/objective depending on what the action declaration was?

The built-in volatility in action resolution is crazy.

 

[Maxperson]

That use of the word ("It's all natural") is so broad as to be meaningless.

And why did you switch my adjective to your adverbial form?

Natural
adjective
1.
existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind
2.
of or in agreement with the character or makeup of, or circumstances surrounding, someone or something.

It was pretty clear in my posts that I was using the word in its bolded adjectival meaning above. But even assuming definition two above, who decides whether something is in agreement with circumstances, etc? How do the players and social contract constrain the GM, specifically?

Since you were responding to me and my use of it, MY use was the proper one for me to respond to you with. You don't get to change how I use it.

 

[Maxperson]

What do you think about what I've written above (and below).

What if a player is at your table and your process is opaque with them ("are you one part causal logic, one part genre logic, 2 parts "rule of cool/story" here?...or does causal logic hold considerably more weight...and why are you doing this formulation now vs this other time when you did this other formulation?") or it doesn't synchronize with them cognitively even if you articulate it to them ("I just don't understand why you aren't heavily weighting genre and 'rule of cool' story in this scenario...why are you weighting causal logic almost exclusively here?").

Now their mental model spits out "not as expected" rather than "as may be expected." And the problem with spitting out "not as expected" is as I put above...even if its a vanishingly small number of incidences per play session, that incident will be disproportionately impactful due to the way our brains catalogue events (athletes deeply remember their losses with their wins rabbit holed, relationships fail because a mate forgets/undervalues the 500 times you were kind/thoughtful/caring/sacrificing and the singular stain of thoughtless/selfish burns so bright).

I'm not sure there's really a separation between causal logic and genre logic, since the genre alters the former. I mean, what goes up must come down, unless magic. The two are intertwined for me. I would say that I'm probably 5 parts causal/genre logic and 3 parts rule of cool/story. Rule of cool/story is great as long as it doesn't run afoul of causal/genre.

I've found that finding like minded players is the key to roleplaying and DMing happiness. That's not to say that running for new people isn't fun and rewarding, but for long term play, the group should be on the same page. I've been playing with one of the guys in my group since 1984. His son plays with us and he's now 31(he started at 16 or 17 and is the newest player). We rarely conflict on what's expected.

 

[darkbard]

Since you were responding to me and my use of it, MY use was the proper one for me to respond to you with. You don't get to change how I use it.

Well, you have my apology; I had no intention of switching your word's form.

I still think your statement is so vague as to be meaningless in revealing process of play, though, regardless of how you use "naturally." But that's fine as we never seem to agree on much.