What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Manbearcat]

Definitely. I think that's an expectation divergence between the players and the GM, and that's a problem in any game. This example only works in secret backstory ganes, though, so there is that.

It does occur to me that the bribing officials in Traveller is a bit of a red herring. The fix is in there as well, because that rule is built in because there's a omnipresent corrupt bureaucracy that player characters will often have need to engage as part of play. So the bribing rule is only in that context against that much larger enforced setting and operates as a mechanical relief valve on that constraint. Fiat rules that deal with fiat setting restrictions aren't necessarily the best examples of things that increase agency. They preserve agency against setting constraints, but don't increase it.

I think the same about Blades' use of heat, as brought up by [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]. It's there not as an example of a rule that increases agency, but actually to limit it to make other setting and mechanical pressures relevant.

Awesome. Ok. I was hoping what I was trying to get at made sense. The second half of your sentence is spot on:

make other setting and mechanical pressures relevant.

I would change the first part though to "complicates agency" instead of "limit it". This isn't exactly a 1:1 correlation, but its akin to the Wandering Monster clock in Moldvay Basic as it puts pressure on exploration turns in the micro and the entire dungeon crawl effort in the macro.

How do you feel about that change (limit to complicate)?

And from there (assuming you agree), do you feel that setting/premise-integrated mechanical elements of play that thematically complicate decision-points and macro approaches to problems/aspirations increase verisimilitude?

That was what I was trying to get at with that post. My contention is that Blades in the Dark experience would be a much diminished experience without the feedback loop of Heat/Wanted Level and all its related components. It brings the setting alive. It makes the threat of the coppers or corruption amongst the luminaries/power players (especially given the Tier status, and therefore threat level, of those setting Factions) loom over your head at all times. It brings to bear the stress of desperation, urgency, and things spinning out of control (inherent to a doomsday clock) that should be present at all times for characters in a heist game where gangs of scoundrels are scratching and crawling (each others eyes out) to get out of the muck.

It would also be diminished if those mechanics were opaque/non-player-facing. Appropriate GM characterization and exposition can only do so much legwork. Well-integrated, thematically-appropriate mechanics bring the setting alive in a different way.

 

[Manbearcat]

Well, on the one hand, the GM can look at the PCs' actions in undertaking a particular operation, compare them against the likely competencies of those investigating the after-effects, and make an educated decision about how much the authorities know about them. Also, depending upon the specifics of the particular NPCs involved, some actions might be disproportionately more or less noticeable than might otherwise be expected.

Agreed. This is the other way of handling the Heat (and related) feedback loop that I mentioned above (GM extrapolation, rulings not rules where there is no systemization, and related handling of off-screen NPC moves/action).

What do you think about what I posted to Ovinomancer directly above?

And on the other hand, if the players find their characters under suspicion, they are free to come up with creative options other than "someone goes to jail for this" - bribing or threatening witnesses, tampering with evidence, causing the police's case to fall apart.

Again, this hooks into what I posted directly above.

I don't want to extend the Blades rules talk too far (mainly because I just wanted to discuss setting/thematic mechanics integration), but a Blades Crew can do these exact same things through mechanics that are integrated into the setting (and player-facing):

The game has 3 phases (Free Play/Information Gathering to get intel/decide upon a... > Score - this is the primary action > Downtime). After a Score, you check for Entaglements (roll dice related to Heat and Wanted Level, consult table, go to appropriate scene). After that scene is resolved, you have Downtime wherein each PC gets 2 activities, one of which is Reduce Heat. You make your Action Roll and we see how that vignette goes. You could also commit to a Score that reduces it further (using the procedures above) in the way you envision.

Now reducing your Wanted Level outside of Incarceration would involve a Score against a high Tier Faction that is almost surely to be higher Tier than the Crew (you start at 0, getting to 1 isn't so bad...moving beyond that gets much more difficult). For instance, Scores against the Ink Rakes (Tier 2 journalists, muck-rakers), Bluecoats (Tier 3 coppers), the Inspectors (Tier 3 independent detectives) are Tier 3, the Whitecrown Citizenry (Tier 4 nobles/elites), the City Council (Tier 5 noble rulers and governers) become increasingly more difficult. That scaled difficulty means all sorts of scaled danger and fallout (even if things go right). A Score against a Faction two Tiers above you is apt to go poorly (so you better accrue and pull out all kinds of advantages during Free Play...and you better have a lot of Stress to spend to bail you out of trouble/mitigate complications) and you may very well end up in worse straights than you were to begin with (if you aren't dead or caught/incarcerated/hanged).

 

[Ovinomancer]

Awesome. Ok. I was hoping what I was trying to get at made sense. The second half of your sentence is spot on:



I would change the first part though to "complicates agency" instead of "limit it". This isn't exactly a 1:1 correlation, but its akin to the Wandering Monster clock in Moldvay Basic as it puts pressure on exploration turns in the micro and the entire dungeon crawl effort in the macro.

How do you feel about that change (limit to complicate)?

It's another tool in the box, and as such can be used well or poorly. Done well it's excellent and Heat is a great example (full disclosure: Blades is on my 'bucket list' of games). Sometimes it's lackluster, like with backgrounds and GIFT in 5e (which don't really work without a lot of effort). Sometimes it's bad. I haven't played any of the really atrocious systems, but they're out there.

And from there (assuming you agree), do you feel that setting/premise-integrated mechanical elements of play that thematically complicate decision-points and macro approaches to problems/aspirations increase verisimilitude?

I don't know, because I can't say for certain what's meant by verisimilitude. It's been overused and abused over the last decades. So, I can't say I really understand what you're asking by using that term.

What I will say is that done well, such rules really drive the theme of the game to the forefront. I'm not sure that's synonymous with verisimilitude (I'm super proud of myself that I've spelled that word twice now without speckcheck!).

That was what I was trying to get at with that post. My contention is that Blades in the Dark experience would be a much diminished experience without the feedback loop of Heat/Wanted Level and all its related components. It brings the setting alive. It makes the threat of the coppers or corruption amongst the luminaries/power players (especially given the Tier status, and therefore threat level, of those setting Factions) loom over your head at all times. It brings to bear the stress of desperation, urgency, and things spinning out of control (inherent to a doomsday clock) that should be present at all times for characters in a heist game where gangs of scoundrels are scratching and crawling (each others eyes out) to get out of the muck.

It would also be diminished if those mechanics were opaque/non-player-facing. Appropriate GM characterization and exposition can only do so much legwork. Well-integrated, thematically-appropriate mechanics bring the setting alive in a different way.

I'm not sure about the diminished bit -- to step away for RPGs for a moment, some video games have done an excellent job of hiding important systems -- you have to play until you figure them out and that significantly adds to the enjoyment. Now, sometimes those are accidental, and sometimes the designers expect you to consult external sources for assistance, but there still are a few good examples. I'd actually put Minecraft near the top of that list.

So, instead of diminished, maybe I'd go with much harder to do well. It would require the DM to be consistent in application of a hidden mechanic, and that's a tough ask. Tough enough that I guess I'd generally actually agree with your assessment, now that I've thought through the implications of my caveat: sure, it makes success at the intent harder to the point that the extent of success is diminished.

But, those kinds of things do require buy-in, and they are, sometimes, very apparently mechanical in nature. I suppose that cuts against some uses of verisimilitude (3!).

Tangentially -- I've long had a list of things that I'd like to modify about 5e (which, given my group, is the current game of choice). I enjoy 5e as written, but there are little things that either annoy me or that I'd like to see how they'd change play. However, maintaining a house rule bible is something I just don't really want to do, so I haven't. Until the game I just started a few months back. I decided I wanted to stress exploration more, and provide a game where the player's choices on where to go had weight. I wanted to avoid illusionism and not just move the planned encounters to the fork in the road chosen (not that I do that to begin with, but still, worth mentioning). However, in one of those 5e things I didn't like, many of the rules in the game actually act to trivialize the travails of travel (sorry). Spells, for sure, but some class features and even the resting rules. So, I took a look at the system and tried to make the smallest change for the biggest impact. Note, my motive for this wasn't that I think the resting rules are realistic or have anything to do with real injury and recovery -- I don't much care and have played many fun sessions with the default rules without a problem -- instead, I wanted to evoke that bit of trepidation in travel. I wanted the idea of straying from safety to be, well, not safe. So I slightly changed the resting rules and removed hp recovery from long rests. I also changed any saves to recover from or resist diseases or other long term effects to be at disadvantage. I then added a safe rest, which is 24 hours of downtime in a safe place, which restores hp fully and allows saves for recovering normally. This one change has completely altered how my group plays. They're still low level, and so they don't have many other resources to trivialize travel and exploration, but they now pay attention to time and plan trips so that they are not out overnight. It's also made wandering encounters much more impactful on the play (I used Xanthar's tables to populate a region with some monsters -- repeats meant a larger presence -- and then tailored my wandering monster rolls to match what's in an area. If the party clears a nest or camp, that entry is removed, resulting in safer travel the more they take time to eliminate sources of encounters). That one small change has made a huge difference in how my players play. So, I understand your point very well.

 

[MarkB]

Agreed. This is the other way of handling the Heat (and related) feedback loop that I mentioned above (GM extrapolation, rulings not rules where there is no systemization, and related handling of off-screen NPC moves/action).

What do you think about what I posted to Ovinomancer directly above?



Again, this hooks into what I posted directly above.

I don't want to extend the Blades rules talk too far (mainly because I just wanted to discuss setting/thematic mechanics integration), but a Blades Crew can do these exact same things through mechanics that are integrated into the setting (and player-facing):

The game has 3 phases (Free Play/Information Gathering to get intel/decide upon a... > Score - this is the primary action > Downtime). After a Score, you check for Entaglements (roll dice related to Heat and Wanted Level, consult table, go to appropriate scene). After that scene is resolved, you have Downtime wherein each PC gets 2 activities, one of which is Reduce Heat. You make your Action Roll and we see how that vignette goes. You could also commit to a Score that reduces it further (using the procedures above) in the way you envision.

Now reducing your Wanted Level outside of Incarceration would involve a Score against a high Tier Faction that is almost surely to be higher Tier than the Crew (you start at 0, getting to 1 isn't so bad...moving beyond that gets much more difficult). For instance, Scores against the Ink Rakes (Tier 2 journalists, muck-rakers), Bluecoats (Tier 3 coppers), the Inspectors (Tier 3 independent detectives) are Tier 3, the Whitecrown Citizenry (Tier 4 nobles/elites), the City Council (Tier 5 noble rulers and governers) become increasingly more difficult. That scaled difficulty means all sorts of scaled danger and fallout (even if things go right). A Score against a Faction two Tiers above you is apt to go poorly (so you better accrue and pull out all kinds of advantages during Free Play...and you better have a lot of Stress to spend to bail you out of trouble/mitigate complications) and you may very well end up in worse straights than you were to begin with (if you aren't dead or caught/incarcerated/hanged).

It sounds like a fine system that I wouldn't mind playing with (so far, my only BitD experience has been a relatively mechanics-lite con game), and the mechanics could do a lot to drive the gameplay.

On the other hand, I don't always want my gameplay to be mechanically driven. Having a quantified, metagame awareness of the level of attention our crew is drawing, and a set of specific game-mechanical levers to pull in order to manage those levels seems like it would tend to make me visualise and treat the gameworld more as a set of game-mechanical elements and less as a living world that my character inhabits. It's something I'd enjoy for a few weeks, rather than something I'd sink into for an extended campaign.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I find it a bit hard to imagine how it would work - it seems like the GM would map the mountains, then draw the "old map", then arrange for the PCs to find the old map, and then the players would delcare (as actions) that they follow the map - but maybe that's not what you have in mind. Eg maybe the map is the puzzle, and once it's been deciphered the actual journey through the mountains is a matter of a minute or two of narration.

Here I must point out, if nobody has already, that Original D&D has a VERY PRECISE answer for this. You break out a copy of the Avalon Hill game Survival and you utilize its rules, presumably along with a DM generated map, to play out the character's movements in the Wilderness. Beyond that you utilize the random encounter rules to add a monster dimension to this game of surviving. It really is quite detailed, maybe somewhat less so than the dungeon, but certainly it has a fairly structured dimension to it, as-written.

Now, I agree that once you are outside the Dungeon environment, and particularly when in the Town environment, the game does become more open-ended and the idea that the DM can present some neutrally generated material, as many would espouse, becomes increasingly untenable. In fact the REAL pitfall IME is that the game of D&D never really provided the means to play out the sorts of fantasies that many players envisaged. DMs were increasingly, especially as AD&D evolved, forced to 'fudge things' to try to get that to work, and the discrepancy between the exploration-focused rules and the story-focused table expectations becomes a breaking point. No amount of pre-generated content, pseudo-realism in game systems, or attempts at even-handed refereeing really fixes it.

But, OD&D, it doesn't really suffer too much there, because of course nobody had much in the way of expectations, the game isn't really that well described, and it really does spell things out pretty thoroughly in terms of a sort of process.

 

[pemerton]

Here I must point out, if nobody has already, that Original D&D has a VERY PRECISE answer for this. You break out a copy of the Avalon Hill game Survival and you utilize its rules, presumably along with a DM generated map, to play out the character's movements in the Wilderness. Beyond that you utilize the random encounter rules to add a monster dimension to this game of surviving. It really is quite detailed, maybe somewhat less so than the dungeon, but certainly it has a fairly structured dimension to it, as-written.

In this case, it's not really dungeon-like puzzle solving, though. The PCs have found the old map, which means - presumably - that when playing Outdoor Survival they don't have to make rolls for becoming lost. So it becomes a type of logistics game with wandering monster rolls to spice things up.

And if you have the map, and so know where you're going and how long it's going to take, the logistics seem not very complicated. So it's really just a wandering monster game (which affects the logistics on the margins - "Let's bring a few more mules in case a roc carries one off!").

I don't think it gives wilderness travel the same puzzle/maze-solving dynamic, with the map/scout-then-raid cycle, as the dungeon has.

 

[Maxperson]

In this case, it's not really dungeon-like puzzle solving, though. The PCs have found the old map, which means - presumably - that when playing Outdoor Survival they don't have to make rolls for becoming lost. So it becomes a type of logistics game with wandering monster rolls to spice things up.

And if you have the map, and so know where you're going and how long it's going to take, the logistics seem not very complicated. So it's really just a wandering monster game (which affects the logistics on the margins - "Let's bring a few more mules in case a roc carries one off!").

I don't think it gives wilderness travel the same puzzle/maze-solving dynamic, with the map/scout-then-raid cycle, as the dungeon has.

A old map isn't a cure-all for wilderness travel. The bridge the map takes you to might have long ago collapsed and the party has to figure out how to cross the chasm. An avalanche may have blocked the pass the map goes through and they have to solve a way across the mountains and back to the proper spot on the side to pick up the trail again. And so on. It's often more than just wandering monsters.

 

[Ovinomancer]

A old map isn't a cure-all for wilderness travel. The bridge the map takes you to might have long ago collapsed and the party has to figure out how to cross the chasm. An avalanche may have blocked the pass the map goes through and they have to solve a way across the mountains and back to the proper spot on the side to pick up the trail again. And so on. It's often more than just wandering monsters.

And why does having a map prevent being lost? Heck, I travel for work and there's a number of times I've had turn by turn GPS and still taken the wrong turn. Unfamiliar places are easy to get lost in, even if just temporarily. A map, to me, would provide a destination and some landmarks. Getting lost is just as easy (I'm assuming here that the fantasy map isn't turn by turn GPS with every tree marked and encounters listed as delays on the route) with as map as without. The only difference is that you know that where you're going is important.

 

[Sunseeker]

In this case, it's not really dungeon-like puzzle solving, though. The PCs have found the old map, which means - presumably - that when playing Outdoor Survival they don't have to make rolls for becoming lost. So it becomes a type of logistics game with wandering monster rolls to spice things up.

And if you have the map, and so know where you're going and how long it's going to take, the logistics seem not very complicated. So it's really just a wandering monster game (which affects the logistics on the margins - "Let's bring a few more mules in case a roc carries one off!").

I don't think it gives wilderness travel the same puzzle/maze-solving dynamic, with the map/scout-then-raid cycle, as the dungeon has.

This really only applies to modern maps, or maps designed with modern sensibilities. Old-timey maps often measured "distance" in how long it took for someone to get there, which could in some cases, make areas that are very small seem very large. There wasn't a guy laying down a tape measure from Point A to Point B. Having a map that says "You are in the Black Forest" doesn't really help much when you're in the middle of the Black Forest. It's likely that much of the forest's dimensions are gauged from people traveling around it and not through it, and thus much of whatever is inside the forest is unknown. A major landmark might be marked, but IF the map includes instructions on how to reach it they're going to be something like "Turn left at the giant oak, then travel northish uphill to the waterfall, and then cut across the creek to the east to find Big Rock Rock." Directions that are very easy to mess up if you misjudge which tree is the "giant oak", if you don't have a compass, if you don't find the right waterfall, or its a dry season and there is no waterfall, or its a wet season and the creek is 15 feet wide.

This actually goes back to one of my BIGGEST complaints about the ranger's ability to "never be lost". I HATE that ability. Unless I'm always running "magical lands" if someone's a ranger, it's almost impossible to throw an exploration challenge at them.

 

[billd91]

This actually goes back to one of my BIGGEST complaints about the ranger's ability to "never be lost". I HATE that ability. Unless I'm always running "magical lands" if someone's a ranger, it's almost impossible to throw an exploration challenge at them.

Isn't that kind of the point of having a ranger around? To minimize exploration problems? Don't get irritated at PCs engaging in good planning and preparation.

And keep in mind that most overland exploration and travel isn't in a single type of terrain. Outside of their favored terrain, rangers can get lost like anybody else.