What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

The secret door doesn't exist after the action is resolved either. It's imaginary.

No. We're talking about establishing fiction. But not all fiction is backstory. Not all fictional elements which, in the story, precede the present moment of action declaration, are backstory - at least in the sense that Eero Tuovinen uses that term.

The two sides of the snippage sit in some sort of tension.

If the PCs search for a secret door, and fail to find one, and hence get captured, and then escape capture by picking locks or breaking bars or charming or tricking their captors, what are you saying is the problem? How is that remotely anti-climactic?

You seem to be saying that action declarations are allowed, and that it's not a railroad - except that all that stuff is off-limits.

Right! Where am I supposed to get story from? I'm not supposed to keep challenging the players, all I'm supposed to be allowed to do is what?
[MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], think about this. How do we generate story in Story Now? We do it, that should be inarguable. So how do we do it if the process we follow works in a way that you're trying to construe? I mean, if Eero Tuovinen means by backstory everything that could ever exist fictionally in the game which extends into the past, then nothing can be created, its all backstory, the orc is backstory, the gold pieces are backstory, its not a useful definition and he can't possibly mean that.

Beyond that, you're (Max) MUCH too hung up on the player's role in creating fiction. I have a player in numerous games. This player makes up great character backstory and uses it well, but utterly avoids things like finding a secret door that wasn't written into the scenario by the GM (of course she can't always tell when this happens, so it does, but she doesn't play on the basis of that). We still do Story Now. Its not dependent on that kind of authorship. What it is dependent on is the GM going to the action, creating situations of dramatic tension in scene framing. It then requires the players to, in good faith, play their characters, engaging their beliefs and agendas to shape their interaction with the fiction. It requires that the GM have the freedom to keep framing scenes in this way. The whole issue here with backstory isn't about "are the players world building?" Its about "does the GM have the freedom to frame scenes according to need?"

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yep, and you two are telling me two different things about your playstyle.

Well, since Pemerton is, AFAIK fairly close to being on the opposite side of the Earth from me, we haven't actually played a game together. So I don't know for sure that we ARE advocating the same style exactly. I think there's things he's more into and vice-versa; so we may sometimes contradict each other. Its just diversity of opinion.

Hmm. I've never been fond of skill challenges. They pull the game away from the character and the game world and make it about game mechanics and trying to get successes. I'd much rather just have the players roleplay the situation, letting me know what their PCs want to do, and then letting me decide if a roll is necessary, one roll is necessary, or perhaps multiple rolls over time, depending on how things play out.

I use them to inform my thinking on how to structure things. So, for instance, I COULD structure Pemerton's 'go to the bazaar and look for a thing to fight the demon' scenario into an SC. Now I would probably frame it such that actually arriving at the bazaar wouldn't be the very first step (for various reasons, but basically because too narrow a focus to an SC usually doesn't work). TBH I might even consider whether or not resolving that whole chapter of things might not be a single SC, but probably there isn't a good definable endpoint, whereas 'did I get a thing to meet my goal?' is pretty 'clean' in that respect.

The point is, now I need a measure of how much 'fiction' is 'enough' to represent a final decision on this question and thus disposition (at least for the time being) of the question of whether or not the character achieved that goal. The SC could thus resolve down to either having a useful potent 'feather' or not, basically the same as Pemerton's scenario. I might however start my scenario with something like letting the character find a place to look for something, maybe its just one Streetwise check at the start of the challenge, and "go to the bazaar" is a potential result. Now I'd have to consider possibly OTHER results, presumably ones less favorable to the character's chances of success. Maybe questions are asked in the wrong place and the party ends up in the hands of a shill. Anyway, it can go from there.

I will admit, this technique might be seen to drag things out in some sense, but it could also force some drama out of the mechanics, with players really working the game aspect of things to try to get to success on top of two failures, etc. It works (not surprisingly) a lot like 4e combat where the party sometimes has to 'dig deep' to overcome some purely dice mediated hardship.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

They were pretty awful, out the gate, mechanically borked, and they were a new thing, so even once they were working right, hard to get used to.

Amusingly enough there was a guy who posted over on RPG.NET and ran a pbm game there (maybe it still continues, I'm not sure) using 4e who came to the opposite conclusion, that the original SC system, as written, captured a certain logic that was lost in the revisions and that it wasn't borked at all! Now, I didn't happen to be totally convinced, but FOR HIM at least it worked quite well! Some of the players in that game have posted on Enworld. Trying to remember which posters that was, but my brain is old...

The downside to that is that it's a test of the players' ability to sell you on their ideas, rather than a test of their character's abilities... ...but at least there's a chance the characters might come into it. Though, it is also possible to run a skill challenge that way, 'covertly,' where the players not only have to accumulate so many successes before 3 failures, but need to figure out what the skill challenge is as they feel their way through it. It's just using it as a tool for determining/achieving difficulty & setting exp awards, at that point.

It doesn't need to be 'covert' at all. Consider the SC mechanic in the context of Story Now. Players are invoking their character's abilities to do things which create successes and failures, driving the fiction to new scene frames which continue the process. The SC literally becomes the flow of play. In HoML there are NO instances of non-SC dice-mediated play (except combats, which are of course very similar in essence). Its literally against the rules NOT to be running an SC! Your only alternative is 'interlude' which never includes conflict (although it can certainly include exploration in the sense of 'lets inject color into this narrative by describing how we navigate to the next scene frame').

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think I agree with your last sentence though not with the post you quoted... Pre-authored the secret door is there for PC's and NPC's to discover or stumble across even before it is "established" (At least in the way established has been used in this thread)...as an example that jumps readily to mind, in some games elves, whether PC's or NPC's would have a chance to detect said secret door just by passing near it, I'm not sure how an ability like this would work in a game where a secret door is never pre-authored it would either mean the ability is virtually useless and never discovers a secret door or it is rolled for every time they enter a room leading to a strange overabundance of secret doors in the world, often in illogical or strange places. Abilities like this definitely seem like a reason to favor one over the other.

As a Story Now GM I was never aware that I was forbidden to frame scenes in which secret doors are an established element Now, this means that the elf in question will probably only find secret doors when either I or the elf's player have decided that there is a DRAMATIC NEED for a secret door, but then again other random secret doors for which no real story significance can be attached seem like trivia at best.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It sounds a lot like what I already do, but more formalized. If the players were trying to disrupt a ritual, they would start telling me their actions on how to do it, and there would be rolls, or no roll depending on if the outcome was in doubt. There might be multiple rolls depending on their idea and the circumstances around the ritual, and even though I don't do the 4e "Justify the skill used" thing, players are encouraged to use ingenuity to come up with ways that don't necessarily conform to skills or character abilities, so there is some measure of "selling me on an idea" out there. I'm pretty liberal with ideas, though, so it's not really much of a sell. It just has to make sense.

How do you know when the PCs have done 'enough' to succeed? What I found was that classic D&D has only ONE measure of success, which is defeating something in combat. So most things tended to become cast in terms of fights or something close to fights.

 

[Maxperson]

This is why I keep saying that you are not distinguishing reality from fiction.

I am going to restate these sentences, but with the reference (to real world, or fiction) made clear:

Since I never once argued any of those things, the only thing you made clear with that is...

4 (Pemerton) Deliberately misstates arguments to evade responding to what I'm really saying.......................again.

TL;DR - the above analysis shows that it is false to claim that searching created a secret door. Action declaration may (if successful) result in establishing a secret door as an element in the fiction. But action declaration is not (in general, nor need it be in this particular case) searching or trying to discover. It is, at its heart trying to change the fiction

The above analysis has more fiction in it than most D&D games. I mean, good grief man! You've completely fabricated some insanity where I've argued that the secret door is created in real life.

This is strang. Using your skills means engaging the fiction and ascertaining what your PC might do to improve his/her situation. That is not having focus pulled away from the fiction. It's what engaging the fiction, and playing a RPG, looks like!

This is about the method used and you know it. The PCs finding what's already there vs. the player creating those things in the game through PC actions.

This is also strange, for the same reason as you remarks about skill challenges. Declaring actions like "I search for a secret door" isn't different from attempting (as one's character) to discover a way out. It is attempting (as one's character) to discover a way out.

Declaring actions like "I search for a secret door" is the character trying to find a way out, yes. That's not the issue, though. The player creating that secret door in the game with a successful search is the issue. Not the declaration, but again, you knew that before you typed that sentence.

I am also aware that there is a variant on that approach, which I believe (from your posts) that you sometimes used, which substitues the following for stpe (1) in the event that the GM's notes are silent on the matter: the GM determines (on the basis of a die roll - Gygax's DMG suggests some odds for this, in Appendix A on random dungeon generation - or perhaps by "objective" extrapolation from what is in the notes) whether or not a secret door is present in the particular circumstances. Step (2) then proceeds as described above.

Close. I don't always require a die roll. If the PCs go into the kitchen of the inn and tell me that they are looking for bread, I'm just going to tell them that they find some. There's going to be bread there, and it's not going to be hard enough to find to put the issue into doubt.

It would be fair to say that the approach that I am discussing does away with step (1), and uses step (2) only, with success on the check meaning discovery of an existent secret door. (Obviously the AD&D method of resolving step (2) is probably no longer suitable; I am thinking of systems like 4e, BW and MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic.)

I understand the method used to create the secret door. Every wall basically has schrodinger's secret door in it. It both has and doesn't have a secret door in it until a PC succeeds or fails at a roll to find a secret door there, then the existence of the secret door in that wall is decided.

 

[Maxperson]

Perhaps this is part of the underlying difference of opinions on these topics: yours, as expressed above, is a decidedly premodern notion of causality and human cognition. Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists since Freud and James have elucidated that, no matter how much we humans may experience our "decision making" as exercises in free will as opposed to your "whim" above, the reality is that the causation of our actions are largely irrational, hardly the "use [of] reason" that you claim.

The reality is that we still don't know enough about the brain and psychology to say that, "he reality is that the causation of our actions are largely irrational, hardly the "use [of] reason" that you claim."

Removing such decision making from GM fiat (what you call "DM ... reason to make that decision") and putting it into the outcome of game mechanics moves further away from the kind of (largely unconscious) motivations that shape GM decision making.

And makes the game worse. DM fiat is the most amazing tool in the RPG toolbox. Sure, it can easily be abused, but when not abused by a bad DM it's fantastic.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What I'm asking is, why would discovering a secret door be anti-climactic?

As I posted, searching for a secret door doesn't defuse tension - if we don't find the door, we'll be captured!

Being captured isn't anti-climactic. Nor is escaping via a newly-discovered secret door.

This is also why I raise the railroading issue. The only mindset from which I can see that escaping via a secret door might be anti-climactic is if someone - the GM - had already prepared some other resolution for the situation.

Right, this is one of the things that clues me that when [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] (in particular) comments on things being 'anti-climactic', or questions the players motives, then instantly springs into my mind that scene from "Wrath of Khan" where Spock says "two dimensional thinking" and Kirk looks over at him and immediately grasps the meaning. His opponent has no experience in space combat, his tactical paradigm is limited to warfare on a flat surface. The GM paradigm which has a problem with the secret door and calls it 'anti-climactic' and imagines the nature of the drama in terms of a designed adventure path with built-in dramatic pacing is like Khan, trapped in an inappropriate paradigm.

 

[Maxperson]

[MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], think about this. How do we generate story in Story Now? We do it, that should be inarguable. So how do we do it if the process we follow works in a way that you're trying to construe? I mean, if Eero Tuovinen means by backstory everything that could ever exist fictionally in the game which extends into the past, then nothing can be created, its all backstory, the orc is backstory, the gold pieces are backstory, its not a useful definition and he can't possibly mean that.

No, I'm not going to argue that you don't generate story in Story Now, but your statement above isn't accurate. If I as the DM place an orc at a spot before the game, that's backstory. The PCs arrival at that spot it happening in the game and is not backstory. The roleplaying they do with the orc, as well as the ensuing fight generates story, but does so also without backstory creation. Something that was created in backstory can still be used in the present to create story.

Tuovinen's backstory is anything created before the game OR created during the game that simulates backstory. Not all creations during a game are like that. I as a player can create a potion during the game and it won't be a backstory creation. Or, I as a player can make an alchemy roll to find a potion that I created back in time and is in the box over there. Success and the potion is created, but since it was created at a time that simulates creation before the present game(already brewed and in the box), it's backstory creation.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, we're not clones!

Maybe @AbdulAlhazred's standards for "respecting success" are more liberal than mine. And it also turned out I was right in my skill challenge conjecture!

The way you get successes in a skill challenge is by playing your character and engaging the fiction! (If your RPG's mechanics pull away from the fiction, then you've got bad mechanics - and yes, I'm looking at 3E and PF as exhibit A here.)

That last sentence describes another mode of railroading.

Right, by accepting the 'restriction' of building challenges using a system like the 4e one (and maybe there are better ones, though I've gotten used to this one) is that I'm in less danger of interjecting some sort of 'force' into play. I only have a limited repertoire of responses to the player's fictional proposition and action resolutions, which must lead in a fairly neutral way to a resolution of the question at hand. I can't really punt it off. I can't easily derail things without obviously foiling the mechanic (which is quite possible, but it becomes painfully obvious at the table, so it doesn't happen).

Likewise the players KNOW that they won't progress forward and 'on to the next thing' without finishing off this thing here and now (again, they COULD completely disengage from the action, now and then that even makes sense) but the game is telling you that you're not playing it when you do that. Combat always had this character to it, you fight until you win, lose, or MAYBE now and then beat a retreat. You know you're doing it wrong if you constantly have to retreat. Combat also has the fun characteristic of an intrinsic penalty for that, often characters are lost in the process!