What is *worldbuilding* for?

[pemerton]

while the GM may have placed two major cities a ways apart on a coastline (say, Boston and NY)

I just want to think about this example, and how it plays out in two different systems. I am not focusing particularly upon player agency over the content of the shared fiction; I am just looking at the impact, on play, of the GM's pre-authorship of this geographic state of affairs.

In AD&D, the rules for travel begin with "miles per day". Then there are "encounters per day". There is also "food required per day", and there is "gp required per unit of food".

So, suppose that a player declares "My PC goes from AD&D New York to AD&D Boston." The movement rate - a mechanical property of the character - interacts with the GM's decision about geography to determine a number of gp the player must cross of his/her PC sheet (to get enough food) and also a number of encounter dice rolls to which the player is subject.

In Cortex+ Heroic, travelling from NY to Boston would generally be part of a transition scene. It will mostly be done by free narration, provided that fits with the PC's established backstory (eg if the game is MHRP, and one of the PCs is War Machine, then the player can just declare "We take the Stark company Jet!" - this is what happened when the PCs in my MHRP game wanted to travel from Washingon, DC to Tokyo). If the player wants to make a bigger deal of it - eg wants to have the Stark company jet available to contribute to actions declared in a subsequent action scene (= roughly, in D&D terms, an encounter) - then the player can spend a player-side resource (a plot point) to establish a useful resource (generally rated at either d6 or d8).

If the player backstory doesn't simply provide for easy travel from NY to Boston (eg the PC in the MHRP game is Bruce Banner/the Hulk, broke and on the run from Thunderbolt Ross) then the player will have to spend a plot point to create some sort of resource to permit the travel, or otherwise is going to be stuck in NY - or, at least, is going to get caught up in some sort of action scene before making it to Boston. (In Banner's case, if an action scene results in transformation into the Hulk, then he can of course leap from NY to Boston no worries.)

With Cortex+ Heroic mechanics, basically nothing turns on the details of the geography that the GM has come up with. In mechanical terms, travelling from A to B is basically the same process whether A and B are NY and Boston or Washinton, DC and Tokyo. There are no rules for movement rates; no rules for food consumption; no rules for wealth; no rules for random encounters. The mechanical framing is completely different from AD&D.

Games like HeroWars/Quest and Fate could easily be played in a way very similar to what I've just described for Cortex+ Heroic. So could 4e, if one wanted - although 4e does have a "keep track of gp" wealth system, the impact of food on that at any level above low heroic is so minimal that it can be easily ignored, and there is no exhaustion system or spell duration system or anything else like that that forces keeping track of travel time. All travel could just be resolved by a mixture of skill challenges and free narration. Likewise Burning Wheel, if some of the optional subsystems (eg the upkeep rules, which depend on tracking the passage of time and so generate some pressure to keep track of travel times) are ignored.

This is another reason why I find [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s and [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s insistence that the GM must tell the players about the intervening intersection (or, in the NY to Boston example, some crossroad encountered along the way), and that it is "cheapening" or "railroading" to just free narrate the travel and arrival, as bizarre. That insistence rests on very specific assumptions about the mechanics for the resolution of travel that simply aren't true for a wide range of RPGs, which (not coincidentally) also tend to be the sorts of RPGs best suited to Eero Tuovinen's "standard narrativistic model".

 

[Lanefan]

So ... how much of this is setting the "scale limit" to which players (and the GM) are able to change the game world?

The GM may set a basic outline, while leaving player declarations so long as they fit within that basic outline.

Then, absent powerful magic, the rules of physics are "basic D&D": Falls and lava hurt (but not as much as they should); normal people can't fly, and so forth. A player cannot make a declaration which affects these rules.

Are you referring to a) a player trying to actually change the rules of the game or its physics; or b) a player simply stating a PC action which would violate these rules if successful?

a) is right out.
b) is always allowed - a player can try anything - but is extremely unlikely to succeed.

On the other hand, while the GM may have placed two major cities a ways apart on a coastline (say, Boston and NY), that is a very coarse level of detail: Perhaps a play can "create" by declaration a village somewhere in-between.

Most DMs, including me, would be cool with this provided it wasn't expected to or likely to affect the run of play. To follow up your example, if most or all of the game play is expected to be on a rough axis between Los Angeles and Vancouver nobody's going to care very much if a player invents and fleshes out a village in Iowa.

I think that in any system that allows action declarations, there will be reasonable limits to what can be declared, and we need to be careful to focus on what is reasonable. Otherwise, the arguments are just spinning straw.

It's a fine point, but an important one: the reasonable limits should not be on what can be declared or attempted but on what the DM (or game) will allow to succeed.

Otherwise what you say (including what I deleted) makes lots of sense.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

The player meta-knows this but the PC in the fiction doesn't know it, and thus if one is to play in character as if one's player knowledge equals their PC's knowledge "I go to the market to buy a holy sword" becomes a perfectly valid - if perhaps naive - declaration of action

<snip>

A player is never - NEVER! - bound by the rules in what she can state as an attempted action.

The DM, however, IS bound by the rules (as amended by her own rulings and possibly as amended by the in-game situation) when determining what results from said declaration. This comes back to the fact that part of the DM's role is that of referee.

Hence the player of a dumb-like-ox fighter is quite free to declare "Trog see Fizban wave hands and make fire. Trog wave hands and make fire too. Trog burn them all!"; and the DM is quite free to respond to this with some variant on "Nothing happens" without recourse to the dice.

PCs don't declare actions. PCs just do things.

Declaring actions - a concept that I think has its origins in wargaming, and is the counterpart to the boardgame notion of making a move or the cardgame notio of playing a card - is something done by real people who are sitting around a table and playing a game.

The player who knows that there is no hope of finding a holy sword at the market is, of course, free to describe what his/her PC is doing however s/he likes. The player of Trog is free to do the same thing. But neither player is actually engaging an action resolution process. It's all just colour.

It's a fine point, but an important one: the reasonable limits should not be on what can be declared or attempted but on what the DM (or game) will allow to succeed.

This speaks directly to agency. Telling players that any action can be declared while (more or less secretly) resolving that some will automatically fail, undermines, it doesn't further, player agency in the context of a RPG.

and who's to say - maybe some trickster god happens to be watching and when the character flaps its arms, it's up up and away

This is a completely separate point.

I could write on my PC sheet "Wears a purple hat". If, subsequently in the game, my PC turns up at a town where the GM has decided that all purple hat wearers get free board and lodging with the mayor for a week (so fond is said personage of stylish headgear!), well so it goes! But that doesn't mean that I declared an action for my PC "Don purple hat so as to get free board and lodging." This is just the GM making decisions based on the established fiction.

The same applies if the GM decides that a trickster god flies the arm-flapping PC to the moon. This is not the outcome of any PC action declaration to that affect - it's the GM authoring some fiction following from the player's description of what his/her PC does.

Now it's true that there are many GMs, especially D&D ones in my experience, who think that all playes ever do is describe what their PCs do, and it is always up to the GM to actually decide if anything flows from this. (An exception is in relation to combat - it's generally regarded as very controversial for a D&D GM to treat "I attack" as simply a description that the GM is free to narrate new ficiton around, rather than an actual action declaration that invokes a particular set of mechanics.)

This is not the case in any of the RPGs I play, however, all of which have an actual notion of action declaration that applies in a range of non-combat as well as combat contexts.

 

[pemerton]

Most DMs, including me, would be cool with this provided it wasn't expected to or likely to affect the run of play. To follow up your example, if most or all of the game play is expected to be on a rough axis between Los Angeles and Vancouver nobody's going to care very much if a player invents and fleshes out a village in Iowa.

This seems to suggest that player input is most welcome when it won't matter!

That does not suggest a high degree of player agency!

 

[Lanefan]

In AD&D, the rules for travel begin with "miles per day". Then there are "encounters per day". There is also "food required per day", and there is "gp required per unit of food".

Other than the encounters-per-day bit, all these rules are just trying to enforce some vague semblance of realism. Travel takes time (unless you can teleport); time taken requires sustenance; and sustenance requires either wealth to spend acquiring it, magic to generate it, or the means and wherewithal to steal it.

So, suppose that a player declares "My PC goes from AD&D New York to AD&D Boston." The movement rate - a mechanical property of the character - interacts with the GM's decision about geography to determine a number of gp the player must cross of his/her PC sheet (to get enough food) and also a number of encounter dice rolls to which the player is subject.

It also forces the DM to determine how many days the journey takes, important if for any reason something is running to a schedule or time limit.

With Cortex+ Heroic mechanics, basically nothing turns on the details of the geography that the GM has come up with. In mechanical terms, travelling from A to B is basically the same process whether A and B are NY and Boston or Washinton, DC and Tokyo. There are no rules for movement rates; no rules for food consumption; no rules for wealth; no rules for random encounters.

No rules for random encounters is cool; they're supposed to be random, after all, not guaranteed.

But assuming a typical medieval-fantasy setting where the PCs can't just hop on the Stark jet and get there in an hour or three, any journey of any length at all is going to take significant time; and time is important. Washington DC to Tokyo could take several months travelling overland followed by several weeks at sea during which if nothing else seasonal variations and weather could become huge factors; not to mention the possibilities of disease, environment-caused mishap e.g. a flood or landslide, or - and here's yer random encounters - encounters with local wildlife or inhabitants.

Handwaving a journey like this is going a bit far. Boston to New York? Not quite so bad unless it's winter.

Does "no rules for wealth" apply just in this sort of case, as in there's no rules for minor wealth spent during travel; or are there no rules for wealth at all in that system?

This is another reason why I find [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s and [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s insistence that the GM must tell the players about the intervening intersection (or, in the NY to Boston example, some crossroad encountered along the way), and that it is "cheapening" or "railroading" to just free narrate the travel and arrival, as bizarre. That insistence rests on very specific assumptions about the mechanics for the resolution of travel that simply aren't true for a wide range of RPGs, which (not coincidentally) also tend to be the sorts of RPGs best suited to Eero Tuovinen's "standard narrativistic model".

How I'd do this would depend on the situation. Let's say that the Boston-NY corridor is fairly safe, while anything much west of that is wild land and the Pacific Ocean is thought to be full of beasties.

For a Boston to New York trip in summer I'd probably roll once to see if anything untoward happens, work out how long the trip takes based on a consistent speed of travel, ask what they're doing for food and lodging along the way, and get 'em to knock off some arbitrary small amount of g.p. if food and lodging are being purchased.

For the same trip in winter I'd be a lot more stringent on what's being done and how, and would be rolling for weather each day. Speed of travel would not at all be guaranteed - weather conditions could slow them down or even stop them at any time - and I'd be more careful about food and lodging costs and requirements.

For Washington to Tokyo I'd almost look at the journey as a mini-adventure in itself - there's the prairies (possible risks: local inhabitants, stampedes, weather e.g. tornadoes in summer and bitter cold in winter), the western mountains (possible risks: local wildlife, navigational woes, flash floods in summer, weather e.g. thunder and lightning in summer and snowstorms in winter), the coast (fewer risks but I'd want to know what they're doing about a sturdy boat to get across the ocean, 'cause I'm betting they didn't bring one with them!), and the ocean (possible risks: sea monsters, pirates, weather, navigational woes, rocks reefs and shoals near land).

Lan-"I've driven from here almost to the east coast and that's bad enough; I sure as hell wouldn't want to walk it"-efan

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

However, while I think this sort of thing could be useful, I'm not sure there's a big market for it. It's pretty much the opposite of the AP in published adventure design, but that seems to be all the rage these days.

Exactly. Story Now is self-limiting. You can produce 100's of little niche story games, but its very hard to produce packaged adventures. This means its just not a very lucrative format. By the very nature of the thing, even if 'classic' RPGs were less appreciated, they would still individually be the big sellers because there are only a few of them, and they sell 'APs' or 'modules' quite well.

Furthermore, if you're a GM its an easy pattern to fall into, just pick up a module and you're all set for the next 2-3 months of play. All you need to do is read ahead some every week, and present the material. As long as the players are ready and willing to go ahead and play to the assumptions of the material and follow the given story, pretty much, it all goes OK. Now and then maybe the GM has to kind of 'jigger' things a little to keep it moving in the prescribed direction, but on the whole it 'works'.

Many of the D&D modules, particularly earlier ones, were in any case of the sort of you're in over your head type, you couldn't really 'back out' easily. The A series for instance pretty much, you could beat feet at some points, but only if you want to give up on the premise the series starts with, finding the slaves.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Side question:
I never bought or read 4e's DMG2 - one was quite enough, thank you! - but are you saying that in DMG2-version 4e a PC gets x.p. as a direct reward simply based on the amount of real-time spent playing it at the table, regardless of what it does in the fiction?

If yes, as a design philosophy that probably couldn't be further from how I view and award x.p.

Well, what DMG2 allows for, optionally, is XP awards for things like participation and basically 'doing cool/thematic/interesting stuff'. It isn't actually a LOT of XP, but lest you think it is out of keeping with 'classic' D&D Gygax, in 1e DMG, explains that this is part of being a good DM as well. Also 1e has a HUGE bonus system for 'good play' where the training time multiplier defaults to 4 weeks/level and 'good play' can reduce it down to as little as 1 week/level (this is geometric, 1 week at level 1, 2 weeks at level 2, 3 weeks at level 3, etc. all multiplied by from 1-4). Since each week of training ALSO costs 1000gp/level of the trainer (who must be 2 levels higher than your PC) its a GARGANTUAN savings in money! In fact, at anything more than the 1x multiplier it costs FAR more to train for the next level than the GP to get the XP to get to that level! This means that a 'participation reward' type of system is built into D&D from the start, effectively.

4e DMG2 is one of several 4e books which are arguably the finest D&D books ever written. Its a really good book and has a huge amount of excellent advice about how to run a game, and techniques for doing so.

 

[Maxperson]

What's the misrepresentation? Your argument against "going where the action is" - in this case, a fairly light-touch narration of the trip to the giants' cage - is that the players might have forgotten something. Hence the GM needs to interpose various possibilities between the players' decision to go to the giants' cave, and the narration of their arrival there.

Your entire example was a misrepresentation. Games simply don't play out like that........ever. At least not without a bad DM abusing the playstyle.

I'm asking, what is the basis on which the GM decides that enough such additional possibilities have been interposed? When are the players to be allowed to actually act on their decision?

They're acting on it from the 1st step forward towards the giants. None of the encounters along the way stops that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's been a while since I played 4e so refresh my memory but I thought if you loose an encounter or do not complete a quest then you don't gain the XP from them? If so then XP is still serving the function of a reward... right?

EDIT: Or do you mean it doesn't server the purpose of individual rewards? If so I can kind of see your point but quests are still individual PC awards....

XP is awarded for completing Quests, this is "the fundamental story framework of an adventure- the reason the characters want to participate in it." --DMG p102

"Minor quests are the subplots of an adventure, complications or wrinkles in the overall story." --DMG p103

Major quests are worth as much as an encounter of the same level (as the adventurers generally, quests are not usually 'over' or 'under' leveled). Minor quests are worth as much as one standard monster, and usually go to one specific PC they relate to.

There is also a provision for 'Player-Designed Quests', which is pretty close to being a direct player input to the fiction rule!

Chapter 7, 'Rewards' states "Characters gain [XP] for every encounter they complete." later on the page this is clarified somewhat as "Every monster slain, skill challenge, puzzle solved, and trap disabled (these are all the enumerated types of encounters in the previous chapters) is worth an XP reward."

It never outright states that an encounter must be 'defeated', and in fact the plain reading of the rules would be that attempting a Skill Challenge is enough to gain the XP reward, though oddly you must solve puzzles and disable traps. Page 120 later does make it more clear that encounters must be 'overcome' in order to grant an XP reward.

So, in a sense, this IS a little like previous editions, at least on the surface. HOWEVER, context is everything. 4e is a game where the expected (and the DMG in Chapters 6 and 7 makes this QUITE clear) pattern is of encounters that are close to the level of the PCs, and within certain fairly specific parameters. That is a 'standard encounter' will have 5 equal-level monsters, or monsters with an equivalent XP value (which will be the XP reward for defeating them). Since the game is designed around allowing the PCs to complete roughly 4-5 such encounters in a day there are 2 characteristics which emerge.

1. The rate of encounters will be within a predicted margin.
2. The difficulty of encounters will be within a predicted range.

Since these are ALWAYS true, and forward progress in adventures is fairly dependent on success in encounters, you can pretty much calculate that a party will gain 50% of a level worth of XP every day, REGARDLESS OF WHAT THEY DO as long as they adventure and make progress.

Contrast this with, say, AD&D 1e where XP is granted on a sliding scale. A level 1 PC gets 1.0x the XP value of a monster that is 'at his level' (has a HD equivalency equal to his level, the DMG lists these for MM1 monsters and gives guidelines for their estimation). The XP value multiplier is a ratio of Monster Effective Hit Die/PC Level. Furthermore you get XP for GP and GP value of magic, which are at least nominally drawn from a table which gives more for higher level encounters. Again the XP value is subject to the same multiplier. Thus XP reward is modulated not by forward progress, but by the level of danger the PCs subject themselves to. This is reinforced by the 'monster level follows dungeon level' design of the core dungeon environment, which gives the players control over selecting a danger level (IE by going down more/less flights of stairs).

1e rewards you for living dangerously, its a reward system. 4e rewards you for playing, effectively its a pacing mechanic.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, what DMG2 allows for, optionally, is XP awards for things like participation and basically 'doing cool/thematic/interesting stuff'. It isn't actually a LOT of XP, but lest you think it is out of keeping with 'classic' D&D Gygax, in 1e DMG, explains that this is part of being a good DM as well. Also 1e has a HUGE bonus system for 'good play' where the training time multiplier defaults to 4 weeks/level and 'good play' can reduce it down to as little as 1 week/level (this is geometric, 1 week at level 1, 2 weeks at level 2, 3 weeks at level 3, etc. all multiplied by from 1-4). Since each week of training ALSO costs 1000gp/level of the trainer (who must be 2 levels higher than your PC) its a GARGANTUAN savings in money! In fact, at anything more than the 1x multiplier it costs FAR more to train for the next level than the GP to get the XP to get to that level! This means that a 'participation reward' type of system is built into D&D from the start, effectively.

Yeah, that's a rule/concept I threw out before I even started DMing.

We still have training requirements, but the whole "good play" bit is long, long gone. It was also tied to 'properly' playing to your alignment, which when no two people can ever agree on what each alignment defines as is just ripe for headaches.

4e DMG2 is one of several 4e books which are arguably the finest D&D books ever written. Its a really good book and has a huge amount of excellent advice about how to run a game, and techniques for doing so.

I'll take your word for that - I was somewhat underwhelmed by the first 4e DMG and even more so by the PH. The MM was worthwhile, as is any book that has monsters I haven't seen before that I can scoop and convert.

Lanefan