What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

A big issue? No, not really. But it seemed as though [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] was suggesting that the DM should attempt to make results work out to align with the players intentions (as opposed to their characters actions I guess?) and that to favor the "secret fictional positioning" was somehow taking control away from the players? Which seemed t contravene the position he wrote earlier regarding secret fictional positioning...though I could be misreading him.

But its not a big deal I think, but I feel pemerton's suggestion devalues the impact of such a declaration, which in turn devalues the fictional positioning of the game, and thus the game itsself.

I think it needs to be clear what is being risked vs what may be gained, but it doesn't need to be exactly spelled out what every obstacle is. In 'move to the action' style you wouldn't necessarily KNOW what those obstacles are. So, the players should know that they're risking their lands to assassinate the king, and that success is fairly likely if they put up that wager, but not assured. Once they've achieved THAT goal, then presumably they have some good notion that it will get them some reasonable ways further towards their greater goals (assuming it wasn't simply an end in itself, revenge or something). Now a new set of obstacles will appear.

This is really almost exactly like how a skill challenge is structured, each action of the PCs changes their narrative positioning and advances them (or not) towards some longer term goal (represented by success in the SC). Likewise an adventure is a sequence of such challenges, which progress towards some climax, which in turn may form elements of a greater story arc/campaign which includes ultimate goals at some point (or at least has some thematic unity within which such goals eventually become manifest).

 

[Sunseeker]

I think it needs to be clear what is being risked vs what may be gained, but it doesn't need to be exactly spelled out what every obstacle is. In 'move to the action' style you wouldn't necessarily KNOW what those obstacles are. So, the players should know that they're risking their lands to assassinate the king, and that success is fairly likely if they put up that wager, but not assured. Once they've achieved THAT goal, then presumably they have some good notion that it will get them some reasonable ways further towards their greater goals (assuming it wasn't simply an end in itself, revenge or something). Now a new set of obstacles will appear.

This is really almost exactly like how a skill challenge is structured, each action of the PCs changes their narrative positioning and advances them (or not) towards some longer term goal (represented by success in the SC). Likewise an adventure is a sequence of such challenges, which progress towards some climax, which in turn may form elements of a greater story arc/campaign which includes ultimate goals at some point (or at least has some thematic unity within which such goals eventually become manifest).

Mmmm eeeyup, think I agree with everything you said there.

BUT, to do more than just up my post count and bring this back to the subject of world-building...

I think this is in part why I like to only ever sketch in my worlds, putting detail only in the start and finish points. (There's a guy looking for lost children in City A, and there's a Lich who's been eating the souls of children in Ruins Z.) Obviously the players will need to discover this, adventure from City A to Ruins Z and formulate a plan, but that's all up to them. I'm here to respond to their moves as best as is reasonably possible within the setting I've created. They're here to to an extent, navigate the pathways they discover within it and to another lay their own path.

It's definitely the domain of the players to determine their approach. It's my domain to determine the difficulty/impact of that approach and determine what information regarding that difficulty the players will be able to uncover.

 

[pemerton]

a DM cannot in good faith to the game, adjudicate things with the players intentions in mind. The only thing that matters are the players actions. They may want to minimize internal strife, but we're talking about killing a King here. That's a BFD and the players DO NOT get to say it isn't, or pass out some poorly xeroed socialist newsletters and assume everything will be hunky-dory.

Well, in some systems player intention is - by the rules of the game - key to establishing what the action is and what it might accomplish.

If the players declare actions intended to minimise strife, including (say) propaganda efforts, then as I said that can be factored into the check and the resolution.

The GM isn't exercising more control over the outcome. He's just aware of more of the "fictional positioning" than the players are. He has to exercise more control for the simple reason that he's aware of potential outcomes the players are not.

I don't see the agreement here. The "fictional positioning" is something that the GM has established, ie over which s/he has control. By drawing upon unrevealed/hidden/secret elements of the setting and backstory to adjudicate the consequences, the GM absolutely is exercising control. Whether that's a good or bad thing is orthogonal at this point - I'm just trying to get the analysis clear.

if you combine your two arguments then you have essentially removed the GM from the game, with the players both declaring their actions and subsequently determining the outcome in line with their intent.

No. I mean, there are games that actually work more-or-less as I've described, and they have GMs.

Two things the GM does that are relevant to the current discussion are (i) establishing the framing and (ii) establishing and narrating the consequences of failure.

I think it needs to be clear what is being risked vs what may be gained, but it doesn't need to be exactly spelled out what every obstacle is. In 'move to the action' style you wouldn't necessarily KNOW what those obstacles are. So, the players should know that they're risking their lands to assassinate the king, and that success is fairly likely if they put up that wager, but not assured. Once they've achieved THAT goal, then presumably they have some good notion that it will get them some reasonable ways further towards their greater goals (assuming it wasn't simply an end in itself, revenge or something). Now a new set of obstacles will appear.

Of course if the game is going to continue (ie assassinating the king isn't itself the endgame of the campaign) then new opposition has to emerge. My view is that this new set of obstacles should not invalidate whatever success the players had in action declaration.

So if, for instance, as part of the assassination resolution (be that skill challenge, or something else), the players have brought it about that the major houses have all entered into cooperation agreements with their PCs, then the obstacles that emerge should not (in my view) include the major houses turning on the PCs.

Applying the general principle that you stated upthread, that there is no in-principle limit on the amount of opposition/obstacles I can think up for my game, I don't think it costs anything (from the point of view of the game going on) to honour the players' successes in establishing certain elements within the fiction. And this is - as I understand it - my point of disagreement with [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION]. I don't think resolving an assassination attempt against a king is, in principle, any different from resolving a negotiation with a baker over the price of a loaf of bread: if the check is framed, and the player succeeds, then it is established that the fiction is as the player wanted, be that that the baker will sell the loaf for a good price, or that the noble houses are allied with the PCs, and so won't just turn on them when the king is assassinated.

A further comment: I think it is a very big deal in GMing to know when it is OK to put some settled bit of the fiction back into play. If you never do it, the game can lack depth and drama; but if you do it all the time, then (as I have just been describing) resolution lacks finality and the players' successes aren't being honoured.

Burning Wheel has rules that deal with this, and GM advice to accompany those rules. Here are some of the things that, in BW, are considered to re-open a result which was hitherto final:

discovering new information, being deceived or being betrayed; losing your vehicle, being lost, being found, or the weather taking a sudden, horrific turn for the worse; your finery being covered in filth or losing your precious possessions; learning a new spell, discovering a powerful artefact or earning a new trait; a miracle happening.​

Conversely, simply failing subsequent checks, or taking wounds, are not considered not to disturb finality of resolution.

BW also has a more general principle that the consequences of failure should be known, either expressly stated before the dice are rolled or implicit in the situation. Combining that general principle with the above, and we can see that finality is not going to be disturbed unless the players have taken action which they know has the potential to generate some big deal consequence that might affect finality.

A system like 4e or Cortex+ Heroic doesn't have such strict rules/guidelines around finality, but similar ideas can be used. So in the assassination example, it seems to me to be fair game to have the alliance between the PCs and the noble houses be disturbed if the players fail in action declarations intended to keep the PCs' roles in the assassination secret. It's implicit in being caught out as the assassin that previous allies might turn against you.

But I don't think it should be fair game for the (hypothesised) alliance to fail just because the king has been killed and so times have become more tumultuous.

The previous two paragraphs also illustrate my views about secret backstory: in the first of them, there's no secret backstory at work - it's the players's own failure (ie the PCs role in the assassination becomes known) that leads to them losing their alliance; in the second of them, I don't favour an approach where the GM relies on secret backstory (whether in the notes, or whether generated by the sort of "GM only play" that [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] argues for) to conclude that the noble houses would sever their alliances with the PCs to try and exploit the tumult.

And to draw once again on what [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] said about obstacles and their ubiquity - if the GM thinks it is interesting to make that alliance, and the stress that must be placed on it by the king's murder, a focus of play, well it's really easy to do that by way of framing, and then seeing what the players do in response. This could be as easy as a delegate from one of the allied houses coming to visit the PCs and proposing that they join together to find out who organised the assassination. If the players (as their PCs) refuse to cooperate, or try to persuade the allied house to let the matter go, well now we have some action declarations in which the players are clearly staking their alliance on the outcome of the appropriate social checks that would be needed to resolve such courses of action.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, clearly that's possible, within the context of the fiction as established in play, or else the player wouldn't have delcared his/her PC to be looking for one (because otherwise s/he would know it's impossible to find one there).

No, she would never know whether there was one there to be found or not; and nor would anyone else.

As for failure, whether or not that leaves the existence of a secret door uncertain depends on how failure is narrated. That will depend upon the details of system and what it permits on narration of a failure. In Burning Wheel, for instance, it is open to the GM to narrate the failure as resulting from the absence of a secret door in the wall. But that is not the only permitted narration of failure.

That's why I just left it as 'uncertain' - there could be one there but with complications, there might not be one there, whatever.

Well, as I've posted repeatedly, mostly I'm a GM. So I'm talking about my preference for how to GM a game.

Where I'm talking about both player-side and DM-side preferences pretty much equally, as for me it's the same either way: I want to be DMed the same way I DM, and vice versa.

And as a player, as I've said, I want to play a game where my character, and my character's choices, matter. [MENTION=37579]Jester David[/MENTION] thinks that I can't tell whether or not this is happening in a game; I know from esxperience that he is wrong. I've been part of GM sackings, and have quit games, because GMs don't want to run that sort of game.

And here it comes down to our different definitions of what 'matter' means in the phrase 'choices matter'.

For me, I know it's not my place as a player to build the game world in any major way; but I also know it can be my place to make a bit of a mess of what has been built via what my PC does. How and where and why and even if I make said mess are all my choices, and they all matter.

The DM puts out hooks but I can choose to ignore them or not; the resulting choice of what adventuring we do is one that matters. Etc.

In your system, something I wonder is just how often - if ever - the PCs actually get a real chance to sit back, relax, and choose from more than one available option what major thing (i.e. adventure) they will tackle next. From your play examples and your talk of "always keeping the pressure on" it seems like this never happens; that the PCs are always up against it in an endless cycle of action-and-reaction. I wonder if this works against player/PC choice every bit as much as a hard railroad does.

Who is being "shortchanged" by you not rolling against yourself?

Not who, but what: the integrity of the game.

Yes it might seem a bit silly to in effect roll against myself, but how else do I honestly and fairly determine how and where - and in some cases why - the dominoes fall? I could, I suppose, just make something up - it'd be faster to do it this way, but less robust; and I could easily trap myself in paradox or talk myself into a corner (both of which are completely unacceptable red flags pointing to a DM who just doesn't know his guano) if the PCs/players dig deep into what happened and how.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

The discussion was on pre-authored content and worldbuilding, not player agency and rails vs sandbox. The two are entirely different conversations, as you can have a giant pre-authored sandbox where the players have freedom to go wherever just as you can have an improvised railroad where the GM creates the story in the moment but gives little freedom.

The conversations are not entirely different. They're not different at all.

If the GM establishes elements of the shared fiction ahead of time, and does not reveal those elements to the players, then they act as constraints on action declaration. To reiterate an example that has been going on now for much of the thread, if (i) the GM has authored that the map is hidden in the kitchen rather than the study, and (ii) the players declare that their PC search the study for the map, then (iii) the players are not free to have that action declaration succeed, as the GM will (presumably) automatically declare, on the basis of his/her pre-established setting, that the map is not to be found in the study.

To say that the players have the "freedom to go wherever" is just to say that they can trigger different episodes of narration from the GM. It doesn't show that they have significant agency over the actual content of the shared fiction.

This is why I did not frame the OP in terms of "improv" vs "prep", and have consistently explained why I don't see this as a very critical distinction for the purposes of this thread. The question I asked in the OP was about the GM establishing, in advance, the setting and backstory elements of the game.

 

[Lanefan]

What 'variables' are there here? There is no challenge which does not involve the PCs! This is bedrock fundamental in my method of play, and it is reflected in the mechanics of HoML, which literally has no mechanical system to handle things outside of the scope of the characters. Any such goings-on are either unrelated to the PCs and their concerns, in which case they are merely setting detail, color essentially; or they are things which DO bear upon the conflicts that the PCs are engaged in, in which case the players play them out. Since no PC is acting directly in a 'scene' between the Assassin and the King, there are no checks to be made at that point in the narrative.

OK, then how do you determine whether the assassin succeeded or not?

It is sufficient that the players have achieved execution of the mission ...

But they haven't! That's the whole point here - the players/PCs have only succeeded in setting things in motion. Put another way, they have only achieved success in those things they can influence - the assassin is hired, equipped, and sent on his - his - mission. It's not the PCs' mission any more; they've handed it off to someone else.

... to a sufficiently high level of success, the rest is already encompassed within that. When the characters execute their last actions in the process, the last check is cast and success (or failure) is achieved. /////// The end results will then be narrated, probably by the GM. Perhaps the players will be treated to a dramatic vignette, or maybe they'll just get a message later on or a pounding at their door telling them the King's Men have arrived to bring them in.

Between "the success or failure of the last check" (which on success gets the assassin out the door and on his way to his mission) and "the end result being narrated ... by the DM" there's a great big process gap which I noted in the quote with '///////'; this gap represents the determination of the success or failure of the assassin's mission, and that gap has to be filled in by the DM.

The DM tossing extra dice at the end of a challenge and giving the players no more input into it is IMHO pointless. The wager has been made, fate has already decreed the outcome based on the skill, luck, and willingness to wager the necessary stakes (or not). In my conception of D&D it isn't a process sim. Dice are not used to simulate some sort of 'world'

Then what's the point?

If you don't have an internally consistent world where relevant things can be theoretically counted on to work offstage the same way they do onstage, using the same rules and limitations and process as when the PCs are present and involved, then you might as well throw out the rulebook entirely. Even if in most cases all the offstage stuff is either ignored or fiated to a result achievable within the rules and process, in cases like this where the eventual outcome is a) highly uncertain and b) possibly life-or-death relevant to the PCs it's incumbent on the DM to at least vaguely try to follow the process - which means roll some flippin' dice and figure out what happens behind the scenes so you can usefully narrate what the PCs see and experience.
they are used as they would be in any gamble of skill and chance, to introduce uncertainty and transform the exercise into one where the outcomes are not forgone conclusions, but have an element of tension.

Now, perhaps a better story would include some way for the PCs to actually engage in the assassination itself? Yeah, maybe! Perhaps if they can scry and help the assassin, or if they actually do it themselves.

Yes it would be a different thing; different enough that I'm ignoring it as a possibility here. What I'm trying to do here is poke at the idea of how a series of player/PC-initiated falling dominoes can or would be resolved when the PCs aren't involved in anything more than the first push.

Well, then that would be a different thing. Obviously the challenge would then extend beyond preparation, or it could be reframed into several challenges, etc.

Well, yeah; here you'd play it out for real.

Again, this is all a matter of how central the element is to the story, is it climactic or is it merely one more link in a chain of plot elements leading to some greater climax? I tend to structure things so that the pacing slows in the highest stakes and most dramatic aspects of the adventure or story arc.

As sometimes the importance of any given story element isn't known until well after the fact (if ever!), I tend to want to even out the level of detail where I can such that it's not always obvious. That said, there's also times when it's blatantly obvious that ***THIS IS A BOSS FIGHT!*** and we play it as such.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

But I think you were saying they CANNOT really know, that there are too many unknown factors, or at least that unknowability is an option. I don't believe that is an option. I might make the players resolve the odds by actions of their PCs as a concomitant of the wager (and I guess that opens up the possibility they could deliberately choose a 'blind wager' if they really want to).

They might think they know the odds...and they might be right.

Or they might not have a clue.

Here we will simply have to fundamentally disagree. I don't think it is the GM's purview alone to know this (and the GM will, necessarily decide it in this case). That's the GM deciding what wagers are worth taking and depriving the players of agency. What meaning do decisions have when you have no way of understanding the consequences? In the real world that might be how it is, but the real world isn't a game

Yet I feel the game world should try to replicate the real world where and how it can, while knowing there'll be obvious times - usually involving magic - when it can't.

and lacks drama or narrative (except where we impose such after the fact).

Nobody but you said anything about lacking drama or narrative; but there's two versions. One is the here-and-now drama and narrative of trying to kill these bandits and their wolf allies before they kill us. The other is the narrative that doesn't emerge until later, when you realize those bandits were in fact one group among many working for the Magister as part of his plot to destabilize the kingdom. Both are completely valid.

This is where our agendas part ways, apparently. I'm not going to dig into my notions of whether the concept of 'world simulation' is even valid in terms of its feasibility in RPGs, but I do propose that it isn't part of my agenda at all. I think there's a certain core 'base and ground' of essential cause-effect relationships that needs to mostly hold true in order to play, like gravity works pretty much like in the real world, etc. However I'm not interested in 'simulation' per se.

I'm not as hard-core simulation as I'm probably coming across, but there are some basic tenets I always try to go by:

- the baseline default is that the science within the game world mirrors the real world when and if it can (weather, physics, astronomy, all kinds of -ologies, etc.)
- where something forces the science to do otherwise, real-world parameters apply where possible (e.g. a fireball glows orange and sets things on fire; a dragon flying through fog disturbs the fog)
- there is no material or game-mechanical difference between a PC and an NPC in the game world; each is simply an inhabitant of that world and doesn't have a tattoo on its forehead saying PC or NPC.
- the rules and processes used in the run of play are assumed to reflect those in use everywhere and by everyone in the game world except in unusual cases where circumstances dicate differently
- the main difference between the real world and pretty much any game world is that the game world has controllable magic where the real world does not; and that there is a consistent explanation in game-world physics for why this difference exists.

Make sense?

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

how else do I honestly and fairly determine how and where - and in some cases why - the dominoes fall? I could, I suppose, just make something up - it'd be faster to do it this way, but less robust; and I could easily trap myself in paradox or talk myself into a corner (both of which are completely unacceptable red flags pointing to a DM who just doesn't know his guano) if the PCs/players dig deep into what happened and how.

How do dice rolls mean you avoid contradiction?

And given that the parameters for the dice roll are (in your approach) all GM-authored, what sort of integrity does a dice roll at the 11th hour generate?

 

[pemerton]

Heaven forbid that someone else have both the narrative "in character" joy AND also have a great game. To quote somebody: "Inconceivable!"

I think the disconnect is that you take a reasonable position, differing player agency in differing systems and/or group dynamics, and then you make an flawed leap to how that is important to the merits of the game. People react to the second part as controversial

There is no "second part". This thread isn't about what is fun and what is not. It's about the analysis of RPGing techniques.

Maybe most RPGers enjoy games with only modest or little player agency. That isn't relevant to analysising the nature and extent of agency in various approaches to RPGing.

If the joy that players in your game get comes from finding mundane maps hidden in mundane places then I don't think I want to play in your game.

Who said the map is mundane? Or the place mundane?

I don't recall, now, who originated the example - it may have been [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], it may have been me, it may have been some other poster whose contribution I've forgotten.

The actual question is: how do you adjudicate an action declaration "I search this place for this thing that I am hoping to find"?

Yes, if there is a map hidden at spot X, then the players have ZERO agency to change that. There is no relevance to this point with regard to the players ability to be proactive creators of the fiction at large. Maybe they find the map by saying the right thing, exactly as you have complained. But maybe the story continues with the consequences of them not finding the map.

What does "the story continues" mean here? Who is establishing what components of the shared fiction?

It comes back to good GMs making good, interesting, and fun canvases for the players to interact with.

In real life, "interacting with a canvas" means painting on it. But upthread you said that the players in your game don't get to author setting elements. So I'm having trouble following the metaphor.

In a good game, the players can be completely constrained by the character's capacity and yet have a great deal of agency because of the very nature of those character's capacity. They may not be able to define the location of the map itself, btu the products of my imagination are like a good plan on its first meeting with the enemy. The resulting experience for all is far greater than my imagination. Your responses keep rejecting and/or failing to observe this critically important distinction.

You haven't actually posted any play examples. Concrete examples would help me understand what you have in mind.

 

[Lanefan]

If the GM establishes elements of the shared fiction ahead of time, and does not reveal those elements to the players, then they act as constraints on action declaration.

Actually, no they don't.

They act as constraints on action resolution, which is a completely different phase of the process.

To reiterate an example that has been going on now for much of the thread, if (i) the GM has authored that the map is hidden in the kitchen rather than the study, and (ii) the players declare that their PC search the study for the map, then (iii) the players are not free to have that action declaration succeed, as the GM will (presumably) automatically declare, on the basis of his/her pre-established setting, that the map is not to be found in the study.

Point ii above can - and one assumes will - happen exactly the same at the table regardless of whether the map's location is preauthored or free-floating: the players declare that their PCs search the study for the map. This is the action declaration phase, and probably is close to the same in nearly all RPGs.

Where the difference comes is in point iii, which is the resolution/narration phase that varies somewhat by system used. And in fact it's the DM who is constrained, not the players!

The players can declare any action they like for their PCs. The DM, however, is constrained by her own notes/the module as to how that declaration is resolved and narrated: the map's not in this room so she's forced to narrate something amounting to "You don't find it here" no matter what any dice may say.

Sometimes the DM is similarly constrained by the game rules: a player can declare anything as an action - her 4th-level Wizard casts a 7th-level Clerical spell or her Fighter puts on 6 magic rings at once expecting them all to function - and the DM is forced by the game rules to say something that boils down to "That fails".

To say that the players have the "freedom to go wherever" is just to say that they can trigger different episodes of narration from the GM. It doesn't show that they have significant agency over the actual content of the shared fiction.

Yes it does, in that the choices they make followed by the DM narration those choices provoke are what builds the story of the game; and it's this story that is the shared fiction.

Lanefan