What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

As far as "abuse" is concerned, I rely mostly on the game rules to handle that. Eg let's agree that a +5 sword at 1st level is abusive in D&D - well, the 4e rules (which is the version of D&D that I run campaigns in) preculde 1st level characters having +5 swores. Of course any table is free to depart from that, but presumably they know it won't be abusive.

Yeah, I don't worry about it. I mean, there are conventions, as you say, and the players are likely to express a desire in less mechanical terms, like "I want to find my father, and he made a powerful sword that can help me do so, which I have inherited" could be viable (or recovered in an earlier part of the story arc, etc). So its powerful, in absolute terms, but the PCs are low level. OK, it doesn't have to be powerful in a simple mechanistic +5 way. In fact this scenario played out almost exactly in my 1st 4e campaign, except it was an axe. Every so often the thing would manifest a new attribute which would help enable the quest. By level 12 the axe was pretty strong, but it was in 4e mechanical terms a paragon weapon. Later it became an artifact.

Obviously a list-based game like 4e allows for highy optimised or even degenerate combos - we have no real trouble handling that through a mixture of player self-limiatation and gentelmen's agreements.

Meh, you want to get stupid with that, I can just throw level +8 at you, its immaterial. Or in a more sophisticated way, "OK, you utterly kick ass in a fight, but can you negotiate your way out of a paper bag?" This is why I HATE this notion that there are 'pillars' and everyone should be good at something in every mode of play. If the GM can't work out his game such that resources need to be applied to all different aspects of the character, so be it. The whole notion is dumb.

This I relate to a bit less! I'm less inclined to "say 'yes"" to a glorious triumph - I'll at least make them roll!

I think you have to trust your players some. I mean, adversity makes the game go anyway, so it WILL come. Remember how the whole Star Wars trilogy goes? First they beat the Death Star, great triumph, medals for all! Then they're floating on the edge of the Galaxy plotting some desperate hail Mary in the next scene (starting of 2nd movie). Sic transit gloria mundi.

The action resolution difficulties are the same as they would be in any other relatively demanding upper paragon 4e game. But it's not a random encounter in pursuit of a McGuffin - the whole situation is framed around this key dramatic need of this PC. (And other aspects of the situation speak to other PCs and their players: eg the PC who opened the door to Pazuzu's problematic relationship with chaotic forces; the tiefling paladin who sees, in the failure of the duergar's devil worship, echoes of his own people's fall.)

Right, going to where the action is is not going to where the PCs just waltz over everything. If that's REALLY all the players want though, I think its silly not to give them some version of it. Like I said above, conflict will always come. Anyway, there's always the larger framing of the whole milieu. My D&D campaign world's premise in the end is that you shape your destiny and the world around you. Only a few heroes are great enough to succeed. To enter into the company of legends is HARD, to enter into the company of myths, good luck! You want an easy victory, you won't be remembered, not like that.

 

[chaochou]

I appreciate pemerton's style and his, and others' posts, are giving me tips on how to manage that style of game better. The idea that this style of play leads to players narrating their way out of trouble and getting what they want is obviously not true. Nobody would play that way.

There's a little more finesse to it, although largely my experience bears this out.

If you take a group of players who have been in a game with complete GM control and give them momentary power - often they will narrate their way out of trouble.

So the fear that players will narrate their way out of trouble is almost a surefire indication of a table in which the players are routinely powerless.

It also belies a lack of understanding of how games like those run by myself @pemerton @Manbearcat @AbdulAlhazred and others actually work. I don't believe any of us hand over carte blanche 'narration' rights to a player. Pemerton certainly doesn't.

All of us, though, are willing to let action resolution mechanics determine the outcomes of player decisions, such that a player stating: 'I search the study for the map' results in 'Okay, what skill are you using? Let's roll the dice' and on a success they find the map. Maybe the map says more than they bargained for. Or they miss the roll and find something far less agreeable.

I will be very open in allowing players to describe things, places, people, events that their characters know better than me, but often by asking questions to focus them on producing fiction which will move play forward.

So I'll say: "So how do you know Chauncy over in the Pits?"
... (player answer)
And then I might ask: "So when was the last time you saw him?"
... (player answer)
And then: "So how come he was threatening to kill you that time?"
... (player answer)

And right there you have a player-authored kicker - a situation they need to deal with. Or the player might decline and say "Are you crazy? He doesn't want to kill me! He wants me to kill someone else!"
or
"He had to say that to save face with the biker gang at the Pits. They're always at each other's throats."

Powerful, driving questions are a very good way to create a vivid and living, breathing world which (unlike secret ones on stacks of notepaper) have the full investment of the players.

Those players who try to avoid such questions or to leverage a perceived 'advantage' in some way just find they've undercut their own fun and purpose of play. I find that by not correcting them, they learn to correct themselves.

One of the weaknesses of GM controlled play is that it breeds constant enforcement and policing. Once there are no rails and the players understand that their fun comes from the challenge, tension and drama in each new situation, I find they actively drive towards conflict.

 

[pemerton]

I authored a lot of the internal situation involving the Shades, which I think would fall into your description of GM driven backstory or secret backstory. However, I set it up as a dynamic situation into which the PCs stroll. How it all played out was entirely up to them and what they tried to do, and the results of the rolls for any associated checks.

<snip>

I don’t think it is simply a case of “solving the GMs puzzle” because that implies a predetermined success condition that I did not establish, openly nor secretly. So skill/ability checks and their resolution seems closer to what I’m describing. But I don’t know that I handled that exactly as you would have as far as the checks themselves and their results. I used a good deal of judgment to decide what the results of a check would mean in the fiction.

From what you've said, I'm going to try a conjecture. Hopefully it does not misfire too badly!

It sounds like the player interest in the shades led you (perhaps also informed by your own interest/enthusiasm?) to make up some internal details about the shades, which you were then able to use as elements of framing as the PCs dealt with the shades.

Comparing that to my own 4e game, it reminds me a bit of when the PCs arrived in the stronghold of the duergar, I came up with the idea for two factions among the duergar, with different attitudes towards the PCs' desire to take the duergar's fragment of the Rod of Seven Parts. A possible point of difference (again, conjecture at best) is that my framing made it reasonably clear that there were two fractins: by the way the PCs were housed (some were treated well; others, deemed too chaotic, were under house arrest); by the way NPCs approached the PCs; etc.

With resolution, it sounds like the players engaged with the situation and thereby learned some of this stuff that you had worked out; and then declared actions that traded on those ascertained elements. It sounds as if the framing of the action declarations relied rather heavily on an implicit sense, among the participants, of what might be at stake; and left it to the GM to work out the details for successes as well as failure.

To pull back to some analysis, and without prejudging but trying to use some comparators that the thread has given us: [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] gave us an example, upthread (the scuffle, the charming of the NPC, the resultant attempt on the Duke's life) where the GM works out all the details behind the scenes in a way that is not transparent to the players and gives them little agency.

Alternatively, I can imagine the use of action resolution to - in effect - establish some elements of situation/framing: so the players know, roughly at least, what is going on (unlike Lanefan's example), and declare actions to try and establish new elements of the framing (eg the Shade ambassador meets with us and willingly accepts our gift). But then the actual unfolding of the situation is left to the GM's free narrations, extrapolating from the change in the situation resulting from the action declaration. The players might input loosely/informally into this, but in a formal sense the GM is doing it. However, that informal element of player input can give this some flavour, at least, of the GM saying "yes".

I think the approach I've just described manifests player agency; personally, I think it can be a bit "weak" in the sense that the players don't quite have to lay it all on the line, because at the ultimate moment of crunch the GM is making the decisions about extrapolation.

I think that, if the players are aware of what's going on in the fiction (unlike Lanefan's example) and have a sense of what might be a bit "weak" in what I've described, the pressure can emerge to drift resolution more, and more often, towards player action declarations that don't just try and add elements to the framing but triest to generate concrete outcomes directly (eg having accepted our gift, the Shade ambassador agrees to our proposal). That's what I would think of as outcomes fully driven by action resolution. (In 3E one problem with this would be the broken maths of the Diplomacy skill; I'm assuming that the system's underlying maths works.) One force that pushes towards this is that, as the game unfolds, the stakes get higher and the sense that the GM can simply extrapolate the situation in a fair way from the established elements of framing reduces. (Back when I used to GM Rolemaster, this sort of development in play was not uncommon. It also accompanied an evolving sense, in the campaign, of how social resolution worked: RM has social skills, but the resolution is wonky enough that the table needs to establish a shared understanding of how they can be deployed and resolved; the rules themselves won't give that indpenedently of some sort of concrete table consensus.)

Of the three approaches I've described - no player agency; player agency but GM carries the weight for the "crunch"; full player agency with resolution determining outcomes - my sense is that the play you described may have been (roughly) in the second category; my prediction is that, if that was so, it will have generated internal pressure in the game to drift towards the third category. If anything I've said is remotely on target, I'd be interested in knowing if my conjecture and prediction are at all right, and (if so) how you felt the game play may have evolved as stakes and player investment stepped up.

 

[pemerton]

The undue focus on player narration rights then makes it very easy to equate player agency as I've been characterising it with not playing my PC but doing something else. This is why I am keen to keep coming back to the example of the map: if the player action declaration is "I search the study for the map we need" then the player is not doing anything but playing his/her PC. And it is the result of that action declaration, not any "director stance" exercise of some fiat narration power, that determines success or failure. That is - to spell it out even more - the player doesn't need the power to say the map is in the study; s/he just needs the power to say (as his/her PC) I look for the map in the study - and then the rules need to allow that a success on that attempt really counts as a success.

Pemerton, let me see if I can rephrase this. Unless the results are constrained by pre-existing shared fictional positioning, the results of action declaration statements by the players should be determined by a rule set that permits success (and presumably failure) and not constrained by the GM's notes. Would you say that's accurate?

Edit - "Should" indicating your preference, not some categorical statement.

I think so.

The first qualification: "saying 'yes'" is an alternative - so the fiction just evolves in accordance with the player's evinced desire. This is for low-stakes stuff, for establishing the narrative connections necessary to get crunch-moment A linked to crunch-moment B, etc.

The second qualification: system makes a difference here. Eg 4e uses treasure parcels for loot. If the players declare a low stakes "Is there loot?" action (eg they've beaten up on some hobgoblins and now want to search them) or "Is there a secret door here" (where they don't really care one way or the other, they're just wondering and engaging in generic D&D behaviour) then I'll say "nothing to see here" and move things on.

For the second case, that's a version of what I was talking about upthread as "The GM tells the players some more fiction." Basically what I'm saying is "I've got nothing interesting to give you here that involves secret doors; let's move on to the good stuff."

For the first case, becaus treasure is on a system-determined feed there is no deprivation of treasure by saying "Can we skip the hobgoblins and get on to something more interesting?" (Other systems which don't use treasure parcels are different in this respect; eg in my BW game looking for treasure is almost always high stakes.)

Because the above is all about assessing stakes, degree of buy-in, etc in framing, interpreting action declarations, etc, there's scope for error! One does one's best.

The third qualification (or gloss, rather): action resolution, fictional positioning etc, are all system-relative. Marvel Heroic/Cortex+ Heroic is very liberal in how the players engage fictional positioning, establish new elements of it (via creating assets), etc. So lots of hijinks in that system. Burning Wheel is more gritty, at least as I experience it, and so what counts as a permissible action declaration and hence outcome will probably be more constrained (as far as the gonzo-ness is concerned) but more intense.

4e D&D is gonzo but probably not as liberal as Cortex+ Heroic. So rather than the players establishing the extra fictional positioning they might need by creatig assets, at least as I experience it there is a lot of informal negotiation between players and GM about what is or isn't possible (using things like "the tiers of play", particular PC abilities, etc to guide that).

Hopefully this answer plus qualifications/glosses helps!

 

[pemerton]

I don't believe any of us hand over carte blanche 'narration' rights to a player. Pemerton certainly doesn't.

All of us, though, are willing to let action resolution mechanics determine the outcomes of player decisions, such that a player stating: 'I search the study for the map' results in 'Okay, what skill are you using? Let's roll the dice' and on a success they find the map. Maybe the map says more than they bargained for. Or they miss the roll and find something far less agreeable.

I will be very open in allowing players to describe things, places, people, events that their characters know better than me, but often by asking questions to focus them on producing fiction which will move play forward.

<snip>

Powerful, driving questions are a very good way to create a vivid and living, breathing world which (unlike secret ones on stacks of notepaper) have the full investment of the players.

I don't use the "driving questions" method that much. (I'll have to remember to try it and see what happens.)

I have one player in particular who likes to contribute to backstory that helps frame what is going on - he often has a very clear sense of how the fiction is working (especially for the stuff that has no realworld analogue, like magic or sci-fi elements; but also for factional/organisational dynamics) and will build that into his action declarations. Sometimes the way he does this helps his PC; sometimes it hinders. I almost always just run with it, and less it's butting into something else that is established, or it's clear that another player sees the situation differently. Then we talk it out.

 

[pemerton]

I HATE this notion that there are 'pillars' and everyone should be good at something in every mode of play. If the GM can't work out his game such that resources need to be applied to all different aspects of the character, so be it. The whole notion is dumb.

I tend to start with the characters as the players have built them, and then that determines what the "pillars" are; rather than start with some pillars that constrain PC build.

The dwarf fighter in my main 4e game has low CHA and no social skills trained. That just means that the player has to work harder in social situations (eg spend action points) or else not get what he wants. It's not as if he couldn't have spent a feat on Diplomacy training if he'd wanted to.

In Traveller, so far combat has been the least important "pillar" as far as minutes of play are concerned; although when it came up, it was helpful to be good at it!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If they're playing their characters in character they're on the same side as their characters. The antagonism is at the character level but it's played out at the player level; and good players can keep their character antagonism separate from whatever they feel about the real people sitting with them.

Well, sure, the players are likely to have some cognitive bias for the characters in general, and maybe for their specific character, depending on group dynamics. They can still achieve a game-wide stance.

Even if advancement and treasure are irrelevant or nearly nonexistent a primary goal is still going to be one or more of [story completion, mission accomplishment, just getting the job done, mystery solved, villagers rescued, etc.] ; and something's got to get in the way of that goal to provide some opposition. And if that opposing "something" is being provided or authored by the players it'd be a simple thing for them to make it a little - or a lot - easier to overcome than it might have been had it been provided by a DM, as players aren't likely to want to put their characters at risk if they don't have to.

Lanefan

Well, I think if the players, IME, have some real ownership of the larger game, then they'll also be able to take a wider view of things. They MAY WELL be strong advocates for their characters, but that is actually perfectly fine. You can advocate for someone, but not want their destiny to be easy. I mean, you'd want to see your character achieve great and actually difficult achievements, right? As to whether those are difficult for the PLAYER, well, maybe in this sort of game its creating the really excellent STORY that is difficult.

I mean, what would be the most cool. To 'beat the game', or to create a masterpiece of a campaign? My goal was always to have characters and story that would be worth remembering.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I know there are other posters in this thread who are more enthusiastic than I am about full-fledged player narration rights (eg @AbdulAlhazred has them in his 4e hack, I believe; and @chaochou thinks that I worry too much about the "Czege Principle" - ie that players framing their own challenges can lead to play that fizzles or is a bit insipid). And I'm sure that if I played Fate or some other game that includes them I'd be able to handle it fine.

Interesting, its sometimes hard for me to say if what I'm doing is close to what you're doing. In HoML you can make trade-offs. By expending a resource a player can turn the narrative in a direction he desires, which is generally assumed to be favorable to the player's character, but it doesn't have to be. It is also possible to accept a 'setback' in order to reacquire the ability to spend this 'plot coupon'. I'd note that it ALWAYS requires narrative explanation, which is normally via some attribute of the character.

Players are also generally free to establish their character's backstory, etc. As you say, when an adverse check result is produced, then it is up to the GM to 'reveal an unpleasant truth' or even make some sort of 'hard move' (IE introduce a direct threat which the PC must then react to or suffer some immediate effect from).

I've found that the majority of my players are also good at introducing general story elements that move things forward. Some of them are themselves pretty accomplished GMs, so there's a fairly deep understanding on all our parts as to what is likely to push a game forward and make it interesting.

For instance when I play a character I generally set some fairly ambitious goals and/or some kind of fairly explicit conflict that can be developed because I know that will push the game forward. Even if its a fairly straightforward 'classic' type of game that works mostly on hidden backstory this is a good idea. In the last campaign I played in my Dwarf Transmuter (this was our 5e experiment) as a highly ambitious fellow who was trying to build a whole new barony/kingdom/empire on the edge of civilization. The DM threw lots of problems at him. I'm not sure if that was a 'lets make this interesting' or a 'lets not let this rewrite the campaign world map' reaction exactly, but it certainly drove the character forward through the story!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm sitting moderately in the middle of things. I appreciate pemerton's style and his, and others' posts, are giving me tips on how to manage that style of game better. The idea that this style of play leads to players narrating their way out of trouble and getting what they want is obviously not true. Nobody would play that way. It seems like the nay sayers should at least give it a whirl.

I think I may have partly confused things somewhat, as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] and I probably use somewhat different techniques. Like [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] I don't really care too much about 'Czege Principle', which is basically the idea that the players will write their characters an easy meal ticket. Pemerton does!

In the technique he uses, I don't believe there's any danger of the players 'narrating their way out of trouble', because all the trouble originates from the GM. It might go something like:

1. Player - "Yeah, I'd really like to find that lost book that my Uncle wrote, it proves that our family was innocent of treason back in '96"

2. DM - The guy says the book is beyond the next room. There's a whole bunch of orcs down at that end of the room, they don't look like they want to let you through

3. Player - I charge forward, sword drawn with a mighty bellow!

4. DM - OK, roll to hit...

The player has established a fictional goal, something he wants. The GM has given him a way to achieve it, and placed an obstacle in his path. The player moves the character into the proper narrative position to attempt to achieve his goal. Checks ensue which will determine success or failure.

5. DM - The big orc bashes you on the head (rolls to hit). You go down. You can feel the orcs grasping your legs and starting to drag you away as you black out.

Now clearly the character has failed, and as a consequence his narrative positioning is no longer such that he's going to easily achieve his goal. At least not through combat.

6. DM - You wake up some time later as something wet is splashed in your face. A horrific visage fills your field of view, a terribly scarred orc face. A second later a hand follows, your jaw is forced open and some sort of strong drink is forced down. "Har! Awaken! You managed to kill 5 of my elite warriors, human! You're too good for the slave pens. Come and drink with me when you feel better!"

Maybe another chance is arising, but it sounds like it will require a strong constitution this time!

I mean, this is a pretty simplistic sort of narrative, obviously, but assuming the player has established his character as a hard-drinking bruiser, then I think its a pretty reasonable tack for the GM to take. The player can maybe try to risk escaping, or drinking the Orc King under the table, or maybe something else.

Now in MY system, the player might be able to establish some things on the fly, like his drinking credentials, or the existence of an ally to assist in an escape attempt, or various things like that. I'm not sure where [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] draws the line there, or how that might differ from what [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] might do in his game.

In other words, I don't want to put false impressions about what other GMs do in your head based on what I do, the techniques and philosophies are, as Manbearcat alluded above, quite diverse.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

All of us, though, are willing to let action resolution mechanics determine the outcomes of player decisions, such that a player stating: 'I search the study for the map' results in 'Okay, what skill are you using? Let's roll the dice' and on a success they find the map. Maybe the map says more than they bargained for. Or they miss the roll and find something far less agreeable.

This is a good point, EVERY CHECK exists to move the fictional position of the narrative either in the player's favor, or against them. There are ALWAYS stakes. In fact, my game, HoML, literally does not allow checks outside of a challenge situation (basically an SC or combat though there's a bit more nuance to it than that). So there is ALWAYS an established set of stakes, something the players are driving for, and something that will happen if they fail. At the very least when you elect to search for the map a null result would be something like "you waste a lot of time here looking for the map before you find it in the bread box in the nearby kitchen." That would be a bit of a flat action resolution, but it meets the minimally acceptable criteria of moving the narrative forward into a more or less favorable scenario for the PCs.

In other words, really the whole idea that there's some big importance to that level of detail, exactly where the map is hidden doesn't matter in this style of play. The GM might well note where the map is hidden, and then use that information in narration, that's fine. It just isn't critical. If the fictional positioning has to be correct for an action to matter, then there's no reason for a check to take place, "you search the study, there's no map here". There's neither success nor failure, nothing hinges on a search of the study. Thus if the kitchen is out of scope, then part of the character's goal must be to establish themselves there in order to search. Here's where [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s information point comes in, it makes no sense in this mode of play to have the necessary fictional positioning be unknowable. Either give some hints or just put the map where the PCs actually are, etc. Long guessing games are rarely that much fun.