What is *worldbuilding* for?

[darkbard]

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."

Look, I'm hardly an expert in the field of psychology, but one of the aspects of my professional research has been theory of mind and neuroscience with regard to issues of free will and identity. I readily agree we don't know nearly enough about how the brain functions. I disagree, speaking not only through opinion but with the authority of science, that we don't know enough to say cognition is far more complicated, involving many, diverse factors, than simply an exercise of reason.

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.

As has been articulated throughout this thread (and several others, recent and resurrected), this is purely a matter of aesthetics. And absolute claims about making the game worse are merely your opinion, and, quite frankly, out of place for the purposes of analysis. You like a game where the GM is free to exercise authority when desirable (specifically, for the purposes of this discussion, to disallow PC actions that run counter to what the GM has preauthored for a certain situation--there can't be a secret door there unless I've already determined that there is one!); that's clear.

I, and some others, prefer games wherein GM authority is minimized in certain capacities in comparison to game mechanics as a determinant of outcomes.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What's the time limit on that? I mean, going back to my discussion with @pemerton about the jewels, he said that the lord sending guards around to search the city for the jewels would be negating the players' success. However, the lord's reach is the entire city and of course he would search for the jewels, so the players getting to the city doesn't make them safely away with the jewels. They haven't succeeded yet.

Yes, in my kind of game the DM decides when players have succeeded to the point where the lord would stop looking. That doesn't make it whim, though. The DM is obligated to use reason to make that decision, and he is going to examine what the players are doing to avoid detection and hide the jewels, as well as what resources the lord has available and how much desire he has to find the jewels. Whim is nowhere to be found. It's a pet peeve of mine when someone tries to discount what the other side is doing by labeling it a whim. A whim is when I am in line at the grocery store and without rhyme or reason, I glance at the candy section and grab a candy bar on impulse. The skill challenge system is a different way to resolve the situation, but it's not inherently a better one.

Again though, it DOES answer this question. The PCs have done enough when they've fulfilled the requirements of winning the 'steal the jewels' SC. Now, there's judgment as to what the fictional positioning of said victory is. Does it mean the PCs have completely left the city behind? OK, that should be explicated in the fictional trajectory of the SC as it unfolds; "guards are patrolling the streets everywhere. You're holed up in the basement for now, but they appear to be organizing a house-to-house search." Maybe the PCs execute a final Streetwise to find the alley or culvert through which they can slip beyond the edge of town, they've achieved victory, and now the GM has essentially framed them into another scene "exiled from town" where they're going to have to deal with the consequences of being cut off and relegated to the countryside (which may itself become problematic once the 1000gp reward is posted).

Now, there's no exact formula for any of this. Its all a matter of judgment and balance. If the PCs now sneak back into town a week later, well they're obviously risking their necks and their old success at escaping justice is no longer sacrosanct! Even if they just lurk in a nearby village and remain within possible reach of their enemy then the consequences of some other action might be framed as "a bounty hunter after the 1000gp reward has found you!" and potentially they could end up imprisoned over stealing the jewels, although in some mechanical sense that might be more a consequence of some OTHER failure. In this sense narrative details can often be as much color as anything else.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

I think this can be taken as the nut of the 'backstory controversy'. [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] focuses on the fiction and claims something is 'authoring backstory' if it establishes some fact that would precede the fictional timeframe of the scene. You define backstory as something that happens in the real world previous to the playing out of the scene.

This is part and parcel of a dislike on Max's part (and I think some other posters who take a 'classical' stance may fit this too) of examining the PROCESS of play at the table as opposed to examining the fiction which it produces. As we discussed FAR upthread it seems like you cannot really perform an analysis of RPG techniques by focusing strictly on the resultant fiction.

I believe that this is the sense in which Max's analysis of Eero Tuovinen's essay WRT backstory is flawed, because Tuovinen isn't actually that interested in what fiction results, at least in terms of technique, he's only interested in it AS results. In fact he has no terms for or discussion of what PCs do in-game. It isn't coherent to interpret his statements about backstory to apply to PC actions authored inside the game by the players. The sequence of events he describes is ONLY a sequence of events during (or preceding) play at the table. Backstory is thus 'what is authored preceding play' and all else is framing or responses to framing. If you don't accept this reading then the rest of the text is incoherent!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Yeah, but what I'm saying is that the caveat "or created during the game in a heuristic manner" was meant not to cover action resolution (I find a secret door) but to cover 'winging it' (IE the GM making a roll to see if maybe a secret door existed here because he just created the scene and doing so with regard only to the independent likelihood of it existing and not based on dramatic considerations or character actions). Thus 'created during play' doesn't EXTEND the backstory authority of the participants in the game beyond what they had BEFORE play started! Players have backstory authority over (at most) their characters, usually. The GM has backstory authority over everything else, although in No Myth there is a rule that it can ONLY be exercised at the table to frame scenes in accordance with Eero's definition of the 'standard narrative technique'.

Now, this means that a player CAN exercise backstory authority on the fly. He can say "oh, yeah, my character traveled to this town before and he knows this guy..." and that's acceptable (at least its potentially an acceptable mode that could work in Story Now). Again though, when the player says "my character searches for a secret door" this is not a heuristic technique (because it is done in respect of the needs of the fiction, not neutrally and not using a purely mechanical heuristic technique that disregards fiction, like rolling on a table). It is not backstory generation in any other sense either, because its OUTSIDE the player's backstory authority (and Eero makes clear that standard narrative technique doesn't include general backstory authority for players).

Some games may provide mechanical support for backstory resolved by players outside that of their PCs, maybe by expending some resource, etc. This mechanism of regulation must then take on the work of preventing the defusing of dramatic tension which Eero warns about which would take place when players are in charge of both resolving and constructing challenges (which is the matter of the Czege Principle). He specifically criticizes 'conch passing' techniques as not doing this.

So, again, why is 'classic' DM-centered technique NOT 'standard narrative technique'? It really isn't so much because of backstory questions, it is because the GM simply isn't 'going to the story'. Its not dramatic because it could take 10 hours of play to negotiate the lightless and unbranching underground dwarf highway in Moria (or particularly one that has various uninteresting branches, cracks, etc.). In principle a game could even eschew ANY ability of players to resolve checks in favor of new fiction or even to have the GM 'say yes' to them, but that would put an enormous burden on the GM to always perfectly anticipate the needs of play and what the players WANT, and to always give them the chance to make the wagers that will provide their dramatic trajectory choices. Its too much to put on the GM! This is AT BEST all you can get from 'classic' play, and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] called it the "when pig's fly" technique (to paraphrase).

 

[Tony Vargas]

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!

I don't see any way of getting around the bug of challenges becoming statistically more likely to succeed the more 'complex' (and higher exp value) they happened to be.

It doesn't need to be 'covert' at all.

It didn't /need/ to be, of couse, and IMHO, worked best entirely 'above board,' but it /could/ be used that way if the DM wanted to have players feeling their way through challenges one action declaration at a time rather than approaching it as an engaging 'mini-game.'

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').

Sounds a bit brilliant, actually.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't see any way of getting around the bug of challenges becoming statistically more likely to succeed the more 'complex' (and higher exp value) they happened to be.

It didn't /need/ to be, of couse, and IMHO, worked best entirely 'above board,' but it /could/ be used that way if the DM wanted to have players feeling their way through challenges one action declaration at a time rather than approaching it as an engaging 'mini-game.'

Sounds a bit brilliant, actually.

I don't claim to be brilliant of course, but here's the nutshell of what I did:

I streamlined 4e mechanics somewhat, so combat is still tactical and 'fun' but individual combats can respond a bit more to planning and various tactics are more significant (like surprise is a bit nastier, being on higher ground actually helps you, etc.). Powers are little bit more potent as well in the sense that deploying a daily power gets you a little more straightforward decisive results vs maybe in 4e its usually a bit more incremental. This is all just basically moving things a bit quicker in effect. The concepts of synergy and pacing of fights remains intact, as do MOST of the actual mechanical details.

I gave players an explicit 'plot coupon' mechanic that very clearly lets them trade a resource for a chance to interject some sort of narrative element, but it has to leverage an attribute of the character. For this purpose players can specify a few loosely defined 'personal attributes', as well as 4e-like background.

As stated before, all action is part of either a combat or a challenge, so there's always scene-framing explicitly active and a definition in place of goal and forward progress. Players can still define 'quests', but there are no XP in this system, so it actually becomes the equivalent of the 4e 'wish list' concept, a player will define a quest as a mini-goal, like they want to find a magical sword or rescue someone, etc. A boon is normally associated with accomplishing this.

Inversion of advancement. D&D has advancement by 'accumulate treasure and battle experience to gain levels' (4e moves treasure to being a measure of advancement and a resource, but the same paradigm holds). HoML has 'treasure' DEFINE advancement. When you achieve a 'major boon', like say a magical sword, you advance a level. Thus advancement is an effect of setting goals and playing your character. This creates a more natural form of advancement that generally lacks the 'character optimization' element as a major thrust. (IE in 4e you advance, and then you ask "what no gewgaw can I add to my character at this level?" and the natural answer is whatever adds to her numerical and procedural power in the game mechanics. In HoML you find some sort of 'thing' and you become advanced). Players get 4e-like agency here from the previously mentioned quest mechanism, which the GM SHOULD honor (this is Story Now after all).

There are interludes as a 3rd form of play aside from challenge and combat, which allows for simple transitions and non-conflict-related activities to fit into the game. It can also provide for simple information transfer kinds of actions (IE you have a dream, you research some topic, you compose a song, whatever). The GM will (normally SOON) frame a new scene that generates conflict, which will then become the initiation of a new challenge. Interludes are really there to allow the players to 'reset', pick a new quest, and realign their fiction to reflect any changed priorities and relationships. This should put the ball back into the GM's court, and its on to the next scene!

Other specific tweaks to 4e include there is a very different take on rituals and other similar 'procedures'. These are now simply fictional explainers for utilizing different skills to perform checks during challenges and allow for alternate changes to the fictional positioning (or sometimes just color, whether you pick a lock or use Knock produces the same results). Thus ALL 'skill tasks' are either simply straightforward application of a skill, or use of a procedure/ritual. There are powers which have a kind of 'skill association' as well, but they're just powers that require a skill check as their resolution mechanism. Facilitating this I fixed the issues with 4e's numerical engine, so all checks are on equal footing (hitting it with a sword or frightening it with a scary illusion work the same, one uses sword proficiency, one uses Intimidation).

 

[Lanefan]

I think this can be taken as the nut of the 'backstory controversy'. [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] focuses on the fiction and claims something is 'authoring backstory' if it establishes some fact that would precede the fictional timeframe of the scene. You define backstory as something that happens in the real world previous to the playing out of the scene.

Well put.

I only care about backstory within the fiction, for these purposes; and how (and by who) it got there or gets there.

This is part and parcel of a dislike on Max's part (and I think some other posters who take a 'classical' stance may fit this too) of examining the PROCESS of play at the table as opposed to examining the fiction which it produces. As we discussed FAR upthread it seems like you cannot really perform an analysis of RPG techniques by focusing strictly on the resultant fiction.

I not only think that you can, but that you must; as the fiction that results (and how it becomes what it is) is a direct result of the RPG techniques applied; with those techniques in some cases being forced by the particular game system in use.

My disagreement with story-now and its ilk is primarily with a) the means by which the fiction becomes what it is, and b) the unavoidable (and unacceptable) inconsistencies that will inevitably result from 'a' which will then ruin further play at the table.

I believe that this is the sense in which Max's analysis of Eero Tuovinen's essay WRT backstory is flawed, because Tuovinen isn't actually that interested in what fiction results, at least in terms of technique, he's only interested in it AS results. In fact he has no terms for or discussion of what PCs do in-game. It isn't coherent to interpret his statements about backstory to apply to PC actions authored inside the game by the players. The sequence of events he describes is ONLY a sequence of events during (or preceding) play at the table. Backstory is thus 'what is authored preceding play' and all else is framing or responses to framing. If you don't accept this reading then the rest of the text is incoherent!

So what you're saying is that Eero doesn't use the term 'backstory' the same as any reasonable person familiar with RPGs would use it; i.e. to mean the backstory internal to the game-world that got the fiction to the state it's in at the time the PCs interact with it?

That would explain some of the confusion, to be sure.

If so, the blame's on him for said confusion as he's the one changing definitions, not on us for simply reading and analyzing what he wrote.

Lan-"never mind searching for a secret door, I'm searching for Schroedinger; and if I find him he can bloody well roll for initiative!"-efan

 

[pemerton]

Tuovinen's backstory is anything created before the game OR created during the game that simulates backstory.

The point is that discovering a secret door in play, by way of resolving a declared action, doesn't simulate the authorship of something before the game. Here are two (related) ways in which this is so: (1) it is not presented as input into the fictional situation being resolved - rather, it is an outpute; (2) no one at the table knows whether or not the desired secret door will be part of the shared fiction until the declared action is resolved.

I believe that this is the sense in which Max's analysis of Eero Tuovinen's essay WRT backstory is flawed, because Tuovinen isn't actually that interested in what fiction results, at least in terms of technique, he's only interested in it AS results. In fact he has no terms for or discussion of what PCs do in-game. It isn't coherent to interpret his statements about backstory to apply to PC actions authored inside the game by the players. The sequence of events he describes is ONLY a sequence of events during (or preceding) play at the table. Backstory is thus 'what is authored preceding play' and all else is framing or responses to framing. If you don't accept this reading then the rest of the text is incoherent!

Right. [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] is assuming that, because the secret door, if it is found, must have existed before that particular moment of discovery - which is a "fact" about in-fiction timelines - it must therefore count as backstory - ie something authored in advance of play.

But Eero Tuovinen says nothing about correlation between in-fiction timelines and the timeline of actual play. And as you say, if you take him to be implicitly accepting such a correlation then the rest of his blog makes no sense. For instance, there would be no need to distinguish between backstory and framing!

EDIT:

Yeah, but what I'm saying is that the caveat "or created during the game in a heuristic manner" was meant not to cover action resolution (I find a secret door) but to cover 'winging it' (IE the GM making a roll to see if maybe a secret door existed here because he just created the scene and doing so with regard only to the independent likelihood of it existing and not based on dramatic considerations or character actions).

<snip>

when the player says "my character searches for a secret door" this is not a heuristic technique (because it is done in respect of the needs of the fiction, not neutrally and not using a purely mechanical heuristic technique that disregards fiction, like rolling on a table). It is not backstory generation in any other sense either, because its OUTSIDE the player's backstory authority (and Eero makes clear that standard narrative technique doesn't include general backstory authority for players).

This too! (And how many times have I already posted thus upthread?!)


FURTHER EDIT:

So what you're saying is that Eero doesn't use the term 'backstory' the same as any reasonable person familiar with RPGs would use it; i.e. to mean the backstory internal to the game-world that got the fiction to the state it's in at the time the PCs interact with it?

He is using it as he tells us he is using it:

Backstory is the part of a roleplaying game scenario that “has happened before the game began”. The concept only makes sense when somebody has done preparatory work for the game or is using specific heuristics to simulate such preparation in real-time.​

That will overlap with what you have said if we assume that action resolution will never reveal new information about past states of the gameworld. This is mostly going to be true in classic D&D play (although even Gygax was aware of other possibilities - eg he puts forward a different approach in the Appendix A advice on solo play, which allows a roll now to determine if a secret door was built in the wall then).

But if players are free to declare actions like "I search for a secret door" or "I search for the map", with the outcome turning just on the standard resolution methods without also being mediated through the GM's opinion as to the "true" existence of a secret door or a map, then we have an example of an element of the fiction that is in the state it's in at the time the PCs interact with it but is not backstory, because no one wrote it or new it in advance, nor developed it via a proxy heuristic for pre-authorship.

If you don't draw the distinction between in-fiction timelines and at-the-table timelines then you simply can't describe a whole lot of RPGing techniques.

 

[pemerton]

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

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.

Besides AbdulAlhazrad's point - how much is enough? - there is also the point - how does the GM decide whether or not the outcome is in doubt?

This replicates all the same issues as finding the secret door - are the players expected to find out what the GM thinks is a useful way to disrupt the ritual? Or are they allowed to posit modes of disruption, with a check being used to ascertain their effectiveness?

Again, this is why I see railroading as a recurrent (sub-)theme in this discussion.

 

[pemerton]

You've completely fabricated some insanity where I've argued that the secret door is created in real life.

<snip>

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.

I don't think you think a secret door is created in real life.

But I do think that you think that, in real life, the player is searching for a secret door. Where is the search taking place, under ths analysis? S/he's searching the GM's notes - of, if the GM has no relevant notes, then s/he's searching for the GM's response generated through some appropriate heuristic - the one I described above, which you seemed to accept as fairly described, is roll dice, or "objectively" extrapolation from what is in the notes.

My point is that the PC can search without the player searching. That is to say, the action at the table need not be the same as the action in the fiction. How do I know? Because it happens all the time in my RPGing! (We already know this for killing: the player isn't trying to kill anything when s/he declares an attack for his/her PC. She's just trying to change the state of the fiction. Searching can be the same.)

And the remark about "Schroedinger's secret door" again shows this inability to distinguish the action at the table from the action in the fiction.

It's a long time since I've read A Study in Scarlet. I'm pretty sure, though, that it doesn't tell us whether or not John Watson had any nieces or nephews. Does this mean that Watson is, throughout the story, "Schroedinger's uncle?" No - either he has nieces and/or nephews, or he doesn't - it's just that no one has written it down yet, and so no one in the real world - not even Arthur Conan Doyle - knows whether or not Watson is an uncle.

Now, suppose that one day Doyle is dictating a new Sherlock Holmes story, and he dictates a sequence in Watson tells Holmes that he has to go and see his nephew sing in a choir. In the real world, this is a creative act - Doyle has introduced a new element into the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes. But of course, in the fiction, no nephew has been created! That happened long before, when Watson's sibling had a child.

The secret door is no different. In the real world, if the check is a success then we all learn a new thing about the fiction. But there is no "Schroedinger's door", any more than your PC is "Schroedinger's orphan" because you never bothered to write down any backstory about his/her parents!