What is *worldbuilding* for?

[pemerton]

The post just upthread of this one was written this morning but only got posted now when I reacquired internet access. This post tries to pick up some more of what has gone on in the meantime.

Pemerton doesn't have players introducing fiction de-novo. They have to play for it, whereas I believe chaochau allows for (at least in some games) players to introduce something, like the dragon example. So I BELIEVE Pemerton would always have the GM suggest the dragon in response to a player's expression of need for money, but then he might also introduce other options of various levels of risk (this was also discussed at some point and seemed quite reasonable).

This is generally true. But, as I posted in response to [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] upthread in our discussion of the "Czege principle", the Jabal episode in my BW game did have the same structure as his dragon example (player says "I need help from the cabal: Jabal is a leader of the cabal in Hardby, and might help me"). And I can remember another Circles check that looked like this too - when the PCs were shipwrecked following their complete failure to stop a haunted ship being sunk by ghouls (an adaptation to our BW game of the Penumbra module Maiden Voyage), the elf princess made a Circles check to see if the elven sea captain whom that player had written up while playing around with the PC gen rules was out on the ocean looking for her. This was another case where the player had written up the story element (the sea captain) and the existence of said NPC was taken as a given prior to actually making the check.

I'm trying now to see if I can think of example from my 4e game. This might count as one: early in the campaign (1st or 2nd level) one of the PCs - the wizard devotee of the Raven Queen - died. I asked the player whether he wanted to stick with the character, and he did - he felt the PC's story wasn't fully told yet. So then I asked him why the Raven Queen would send him back - the death had happened fighting in the vicinity of an old Nerathi ruin, and so the PC decided that Erathis and the Raven Queen would send the character back into life to recover an important item from that ruin - the Sceptre of Erathis, also known as the Sceptre of Law, which - some time later - I decided to treat as the first stage of the Rod of Seven Parts. The player there established the need of some NPCs (Erathis and the Raven Queen) and the answer to that need (send Malstaph back into the world to restore the Sceptre of Law and thereby restore order to the land).

So maybe I'm not as conservative as I thought! (But still more than [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION], I daresay.)

there are details we weren't provided with in this scenario that can materially change my perceptions, potentially. For example Pemerton never stated that OTHER options weren't presented, he was entirely silent on that. Nor did he provide all significant details of the Vecna option. Was it presented as a possibility that the character had to pursue? Was it dropped on him as a take this or face the consequences (IE Vecna showed up and said "join me or perish!")? I don't know! The character might have very well had a 'third way' option (IE ignore Vecna and just go about his business and let Rel Astra take care of itself, though I think this might be seen as an abnegation of the character itself in this case). Were I that player I might well work to find some middle way, like betraying Vecna or something like that. I think these all fall under my rubrik of 'hoist himself off the horns of the dilemma' and they would all presumably entail great risks!

Anyway, I think this sort of thing is the ESSENCE of great play! As a player how much more delicious can it be then to portray the actions of my character in a profound situation of moral danger! Nothing can allow strong characterization as well as this! Others talk about exploring the fantasy world, but this is a whole dimension of it, the personalities of its inhabitants, particularly of the PC I'm playing.

Your last paragraph is what I was getting at quite a bit upthread, when I said that I want to play my character, rather than be driven by the GM.

As far as the Vecna scenario is concerned, I'm trying to recall things from over 20 years ago (it was back when I was GMing a University club game) and so memory is not perfect. I've said some stuff in other recent posts in this thread, but to summarise: the player was playing a mage who was part of an ancient and surviving Sueloise order, and (as was often the default for this player) was seeking world domination; Vecna was introduced into the situation by me, as a member of the same order but who had gone into sleep (or lichdom or whatever - details are forgotten!) back in the time when the Suel Empire was a real thing - and when the PCs woke him he was surprised by the changes that had happened in the intervening millenium or so; the PC tracked down Vecna (I think - or at least answered an invitation) and sort an alliance; and then the whole Rel Astra thing fell out of that.

I don't remember what other options were on the table at the time, but I know it was controversial with the other players that the PC should make this alliance with Vecna - especially because, while he was off doing that in the general vicinity of the Baklun lands (the west of the GH double map), the other PCs got into strife following an operation in the Wild Coast or Pomarj (middle of the double map) and felt that, had Xanthos been there, things would have worked out much better!

It felt relatively agentic at the time, and I don't think my contemporary glasses are too rose-coloured, though I would guess that my handling of some of the elements of it probably wasn't quite as elegant as I would hope to be able to pull off these days.

Taken on its face, the example of 'the map cannot be found in the study because its hidden in some other non-obvious place.' doesn't leap out as being an example of player agency.

Agreed.

In fact in my own game system it could only exist in that form as an 'interlude' a segment of descriptive play in which nothing is being staked (but which might act as a transition and scene setting device for later challenges). Thus not finding the map is perfectly OK, but no check would ever be made. The map simply isn't important and agency isn't addressed by it.

This is not too different from what I posted just above this post, though I discussed it in terms of how I would frame it and handle narration, rather than as part of a discrete "interlude" mechanic. But like you, no check!

pemerton has often spoken about setting the stakes before the roll with the 'yes but complication', and I'm pretty sure he has probably listed something like this so openly before, but I have never actually seen it. This is a whole new way of roleplaying D&D for me. It makes understanding the handling of the 4e SC mechanic much easier. Thanks for the detailed example.

The example [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] posted made me think first of Dungeon World (which itself is based on Apocalypse World, but I know DW better as a system, though have only limited play experience with it): DW is a 2d6 system, and adds are generally fairly modest, and the default spread for any check is 10+, get what you want; 7 to 9 either miss out, or take what you want but get a complication to go with it; 6 or less, sucks to be you. That's the generic structure: there are a lot of detailed versions of it (eg for fighting, for searching, for avoiding dange, etc) and they put more detail into the sorts of complications or upsets the GM is empowered to establish on the results below 10.

Burning Wheel (which I know better than DW, and have a lot more play experience with) has as the official rule that every check has explicit failure consequences established (the consequences of success are also explicit: the player's intention is realised). But in his GM advice book for the system - the Adventure Burner (which I think is a first rate advice book for non-BW GMs also) - Luke Crane admits that at his table he doesn't always follow the official rule. Often he just allows the consequence of failure to be implicit in the situation, relying on his players' knowledge of him as a GM plus the shared knowledge everyone has of what's going on in the game and what it is that would count - given where the play is at - as "sucks to be you". In my own BW GMing I often use a similar approach, letting the situation carry the weight of signalling consequences.

Sometimes this is a bit lazy - there have been occasions when a player's check fails, and it turns out, now that we're all forced to look at it, that the situation wasn't quite as fraught in quite as clear a way as it seemed going in, and so establishing the proper consequence takes more effort and is perhaps a little more strained than it should be. But more often, I find that the adverse consequence flows pretty naturally out of the situation.

So when the Circles check to meet Jabal was failed, none of the players was remotely surprised or taken aback by Athog - Jabal's hired help - turning up at the inn where they were taking lunch and telling them to move on, while looking warily at the feather that Jobe was carrying. Or when the PCs got lost in the catacombs trying to get to Jabal's tower to protect Jobe's brother from the assassin (whom they had drugged with a sleeping potion, to help make sure they were able to get there first), it was clear that a failed check was going to cause them to get lost and so lose time. And when I then told them that, as they come up to a street-level grille to try and get their bearings, they saw the assassin their looking down and taunting them, they were horrified but not (as players) shocked - when you set up your headstart, but then squander it wandering through the catacombs, well you might lose it again.

One thing that I personally think is important - and I try to be much more systematic about it than I would ever have been back in the Xanthos, Xialath and Vecna days - is letting the players know what number they need to roll.

In a game like BW or 4e this is absolutely crucial, so they can decide what resources to throw at the problem (action points and powers in 4e, fate points in BW, etc). In Cortex+ Heroic everything is also done in the open, but often the players have to go first and so only get to choose what target number to set the GM (everything in that system is an opposed roll, with the GM rolling the Doom Pool if there is no NPC opponent involved) - this sets my players on edge as they have to decide blind how much to spend, but I think without it the GM would win even fewer rolls!

In Traveller we're doing all rolls in the open too (except for the Psionics Institute ones - a strange rule, but I'm following it). The players don't have resources to spend like in some of those other games, but I still like the feel it gives. Even treating reaction rolls as player checks to exert social influence - which is how I handle it - makes it feel like the players are driving things, if only through it being about their luck rather than mine!

 

[pemerton]

Yes, I think this is fair. [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] and I have discussed this, and our goals tend to converge although we use our own sets of techniques to get there. I don't think Pemerton would mind if I said his style was more traditional than mine. I know my style isn't the most hippy freeform going, but my games are quite improvisational, GM-reactive, and challenging for my players.

I run games which demand a high degree of player input, with a lot of leading questions, a lot of pressure. I don't think [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] drives his players quite as hard!

I think this is fair. What [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] has called "traditional", I called "conservative" in a couple of recent posts. Same thing.

I like to push my players, but not as hard as I know from his posts [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] does! Maybe not even as hard as [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] (I'm a bit less sure there). And I have players who like different things. So one guy absolutely loves Burning Wheel, but some of the others don't always like how demanding and gritty it can get.

Then I have another one - the player of the wizard/invoker from the 4e game - who (to meet him at a wargame meet-up or RPG club or whatever) you would think is the most traditional player ever - he's been carrying his dice in the same bag for the 20-something years I've known him - but when doing some Arcana thing in 4e, or trying to establish some asset in Cortex+ Heroice, he will just narrate all this backstory (about how magic works, about what the runes in a cave mean, about how the NPC motives hook together) and build his action declaration around it. And when all this implicit fiction counts against him rather than for him he takes it absolutely without complaint: he was the first in the party to work out they'd found the Sword of Kas, because as soon as I told him that it damaged him when he picked it up, he knew what that was about! (As his PC has always had a bit of a Vecna-revering edge to him, even though Erathis, the Raven Queen and Ioun are his main sponsors.) And when, much later on, he chose to send souls liberated from the Soul Abattoir into the care of the Raven Queen rather than Vecna, he didn't even flinch when I told him that Vecna struck down his imp (in whom the Eye of Vecna was implanted) in retaliation. Of course, when a little time later the PCs defeated an Aspect of Vecna, this same player then invented his own ritual to restore his imp to life and free the Eye from Vecna's influence.

fundamentally we both value player-agency over GM scripting as the driving force in our games.

Absolutely!

For me, some of it is big stuff (deciding that your gods have sent you back into the world to find the Sceptre of Erathis) and some of it is small stuff (deciding that you can use a defeated Aspect of Vecna as the focus for a ritual to permanently sever Vecna's connection to his Eye), but it all cumulates to make the game and the shared fiction what it is.

 

[pemerton]

I’m just asking if it’s possible for framing to limit player agency. I didn’t want to give a specific example because I was speaking generally. Is it possible? If you’d like, we can use the example you gave of framing a scene where the PCs have been captured. The 5E adventure Out of the Abyss is a recent example of this.

Now, I want to make it clear that I have no real problem with this kind of start. I think it’s a perfectly valid approach to a game.

But I would have to describe this framing as being pretty GM driven.

I think it depends where it comes from.

The one time I can recall doing a fully-fledged "total party capture" was around 3rd level in my main 4e game. The PCs were defeated in a combat, but only one was fully dead (dropped below negative bloodied hp by "friendly fire"). I asked who wanted to keep going, who wanted to change PCs, etc - the warlock player wanted to change to sorcerer (feylocks are a hard build to play) and the others all wanted to stick with their PCs. So 3 of the PCs awake in their goblin cell; they can smell roasing half-elf (the unhappy fate ot the warlock); there's a strange drow in the cell with them (the new sorcerer); and meanwhile, the paladin PC surges back to life on the altar where the goblin shaman has been trying to use his body as an ingredient of an undead-summoning ritual.

I don't see that as agency-negating. It's a consequence of the earlier failure - which was a pretty hard failure, the first TPK for our group in over 10 years - and where it puts the continuity of the PCs into question, the details of that have been discussed with the players.

A hard frame into a capture without any context resuling from prior play and consequences I think might be a different thing. It would depend on context, of course.

I think an important feature of the "standard narrativistic model" - and it's coming out in a lot of [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s posts too, about how he would handle various things - is that there's a general transparency about what's going on. So if the GM misjudges, and the framing is experienced by the players as agency-negating, or not speaking to their concerns, this will come out - because either it will fall flat (and so you move on, establishing whatever narrative continuity, or even retcon if necessary, will get things to somewhere where the game picks up again), or the players will take hold of it and turn it their way and then you'll see that agency re-emerge.

I guess that a continual back-and-forth power struggle is conceivable. That would be a degenerate game. And the degeneracy would be pretty obvious to the participants!

I’m sure that ideally the GM would have the captors be antagonists that at least one player has indicated would be interesting and incorporated them into his character’s goals, and so on. But what if that’s not the case?

Well, for my part, I probably wouldn't be framing a capture then!

Though again context is just about everything. In my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy Hack game, the PCs were fighting a crypt thing. The doom pool got to 2d12, and in this system if the doom pool has 2d12 in it then the GM can spend those dice to end the scene. So I did - and given that the scene-ending was one with the PCs fighting a crypt thing, I had it teleport them to some distant room in the dungeon.

So they weren't captured, but they were lost - and so all started the scene with a d12 Lost in the Dungeon complication.

Pretty soon, as they commenced wandering the dungeon looking for a way out, I framed a scene in which they found themselves in a large chamber with Sigils on the wall (a scene distinction). One of the players - the same one who plays the invoker/wizard - declared an action to eliminate his Lost in the Dungeon complication, resting on the premise that the Sigils were actually a map/description of the dungeon. His check succeeded, and so indeed the PC was able to decipher the sigils, and work out where he was in the dungeon, and hence ceased to be lost.

That's not strictly a capture scenario, but it's in the neighbourhood. It wasn't a big thematic thing - the system is pretty romp-y, and that particular episode was more about me getting to use a crpyt thing for the first time in a long time (like, decades)! But it didn't shut down player agency, and because of how the system works, and the way it expects the players to engage the fiction, it left plenty of opportunity for the players to do the things they wanted to do with their PCs.

It certainly puts pressure on the players to do things...but it also forces the story down a certain path, at least for a bit.

I can see why you say this, but I don't think I agree. The example I just gave probably explains that a bit, but I'll say some more.

In real life, being in prison obviously is pretty different, and far more constraining, than being in (say) a tavern. But when we're talking about a shared fiction, it's just another bit of fictional positioning.

In my 4e game, the PCs broke out of the cell and killed all the goblins (whom they had their eyes on in any event); but then later on, when some were rather house-bound "guests" of the duergar, they made friend with them and (sort-of) tried to save them from the doom that they (sort-of, a bit but not completely inadvertantly) brought down upon them.

In my BW game, the wizard Jobe has spent the last couple of sessions in prison. Some failed checks have meant he hasn't been able to escape, but various personages keep coming to visit him - first the Gynarch of Hardby, and now Jabal (whom I think he is likely to try and kill the next time we get a chance to play). The fact that the action has been confined to a prison hasn't stopped the player being able to drive things.

I think framing the PCs into capture isn't as wildly different from other situations as is sometimes thought - but perhaps it throws some questions around technique, agency etc into particularly sharp relief.

Burning Wheel also has advice for players which I agree with: the player has an obligation to play his/her PC so that his/her stuff comes out in play.

how can players do that? Or how can they do that at all times? Surely if Tim’s warlock has the spotlight and the story has become about a struggle between Tim’s patron and another entity, how can Bob the fighter seek revenge for the death if his brother? Wouldn’t Bob’s attempts to bring that up distract from Tim’s story? Are they supposed to take turns?

Or perhaps as you indicate in the third item, perhaps Bob’s brother was killed by followers of the rival of Tim’s patron. Nice and convenoent....I do tend to try to do this where I see such connections. But...isn’t that potentially an example of GM force?

Establishing connections is one way of doing it, but I don't really see where GM force comes in - the players can work this stuff out for themselves! In my BW game it turned out that the PC assassin's sinister master, who tormented her until she fled from him into the forest, was the balrog-possessed brother of the wizard PC. That possibility was pretty obviously on the table as soon as one player wrote a Belief "I'll free my [wizard] brother from evil possession" and another "I'm going to flay my [wizard] former master and send his soul to . . .", and I took it as given from the get-go, but the players didn't actually confirm it, in play, until quite a few sessions in (I think it might have been triggered by the finding of the black arrows when hoping to find the mace), when the player of the assassin PC finally decided that she had learned enough, in character, to arrive at the realisation that her evil master was the same wizard that the other PC was trying to save.

And I guess that up until that point it was always open for it to go a different way, although I don't think that was ever a realistic likelihood.

But as well as this sort of interlinking, which I aim for just by generic GMing techniques, and which (say) Fate establishes by default as part of the PC build process, I thik it's reasonable to expect players to engage the fiction with an eye on their stuff even if the GM hasn't put it clearly in front of them. (This is an individualised application of the idea that "the players will take hold of it and turn it their way and then you'll see that agency re-emerge.")

So in my Traveller game, when the PCs were at the manse of the bishop trying to learn about alien artefacts on Enlil, and various religious-type topics were being discussed, one of the PCs asked (not quite so blatantly, but not very subtly either) whether practitioners of the world's religion have psychic powers. This is because that PC has no real interest in aliens, but is ultra-keen on learning psionics. It was a pretty provocative question, and I called for a reaction check (with a bonus for the previous successful interaction) which didn't go too well, and so the PC didn't get to learn exactly what she wanted. But it wasn't a complete dead end either, and it certainly took her closer to her goal - she now wants to go to Ashar, which is another world that seems to be connected to, or perhaps the source of, Enlil's religion.

That's not a particularly profound example, but it shows how a player can play for his/her stuff even if the GM hasn't really put it front and centre. Another example I can think of is from my 4e game, and involved a confrontation with Yan-C-Bin. This was first and foremost about the Emergent Primordial PC, who is a worshipper of Corellon as well as a devotee of Chan, the Queen of Good Air Elementals (who sided with Corellon and other gods during the Dawn War) - he had been tempted by Yan-C-Bin, and Pazrael, and chaotic forces more generally, early in the campaign, and this was something of a culmination of those earlier episodes. But ultimately it was the player of the fighter PC who seized control of this situation with both hands. The character is an Eternal Defender in service to Moradin, and the only PC with "Good" in the alignment box on his PC shet; and he also (following Torog's death) has taken on the portfolio of imprisonment, pain and torture. When Yan-C-Bin started reciting a litany of wrongs done to the djinni since the Dawn War, including their jailing, the player of the fighter PC gave a powerful speech in reply. Here's an excerpt from my actual play report of this session:

Both in the fiction and at the table this was the pivotal moment. The player gave an impassioned and quite eloquent speech, which went for several minutes with his eyes locked on mine. (We tend to be quite a causal table as far as performance, in-character vs third person description of one's PC vs out-of-character goes.) He explained (in character) that he would personally see to it that no djinni would be unjustly imprisoned, if they now refrained from launching the Dusk War; but that if they acted rashly and unjustly they could look forward to imprisonment or enslavement forever.

I think that proactive players actively look for ways to engage with the fiction, to get their stuff out there, and make it speak to them. Sometimes there can be a bit of turn-taking or spotlight sharing, but for me the game is at its best when multiple players are each engaging with a given situation and trying to do something with it.

EDIT: I just saw this post, which is closely related:

For me, when all the problems start to conveniemtly commect to one another, that seems a bit forced. I get it that the players may all be cool with it (and ultimately i would say that’s all that matters), but what if one player is uninterested in the elements of another player character’s story?

Examining only the ideal seems wrong. So what happens when things get problematic in that way? Tim the warlock wants to deal with his patron’s goals and desires, but he doesn’t care about Bob wanting to (yaaaawn) hunt down the drow that murdered his brother.

Well, Tim's player and Bob's player are both sitting at the table together, so they're already committed to doing this thing together. What actual form that takes can be pretty varied, though.

In my old RM game (with Vecna et al), Xanthos and Xialath were two of the main PCs - both wizards of an ancient order, both happy to engage in a bit of demon summoning and black magic. Xanthos was a very standard wizard build for our game - good lore skills, good meditation (helpful for quick recovery of spell points), OK perception, excellent Duping and Lie Perception but otherwise mediocre social skills (he relied on his enchantment magic!) Xialath, on the other hand, had been built a bit differently - excellent perception, excellent all-round social, lawyering as well as other lore, engineering (to help with his Rock to Mud spells) - but, as a result, no meditation.

So when Xialath's player found himself falling behind in respect of spell point recovery, he leveraged his other PC assets - good Streetwise, for instance - and made contact with drug dealers in the shadier parts of the Rel Astran bazaars, and bought himself some hugar - a spell point recovery enhancing drug on the RM equipment tables, but quite expensive and highly addictive. So Xialath ended up addicated to hugar, and had to forego the lease on his estate because he ran out of money, and ended up utterly wretched and destitute (there were some other factors in there as well, but the hugar was the beginning of the slippery slope).

The upshot was that we had these two PCs, one trying to arrange world domination, the other hoping to be a magistrate but instead - while a powerful wizard - broke, homeless, addicated to a mind-altering drug, and really at the end of his tether. How did these two character arcs intersect? Well sometimes simply through Xanthos turning up in the morning (after the PCs rested for spell points) and making sure Xialath was ready to leave for whatever mission they had planned. Sometimes it meant Xanthos buying Xialath the hugar he needed to function. And ultimately it meant that Xanthos offered Xialath a return to status and influence in Rel Astra - and a magistracy! - if he would join with Vecna in the conquest of Rel Astra.

Ultimately it's a social game, and so people have to be able to get along in their play. And at least in my group, the players use the standard range of social techniques for trying to make sure this works out, just like in any other ongoing collective enterprise. We had one player who probably once a year or so could get pretty heated if he thought another player was being a d*ck, but I'm not talking about anything more than a few harsh words.

But what I'm trying to show with some of these examples is that there are a lot of different ways that players can connect and intertwine their PCs - and that's even before the GM starts looking to do the same with framing - to make the game work smoothly for everyone involved.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think you basically suggested one solution up thread, let the goals of the two PCs come into consonance with each other, so they can pursue them through a single narrative. Is it 'contrived'? Mmmm, moreso than characters who have murdered relatives they want to avenge (and actually WILL try to avenge)? I mean I can't judge the frequency of warlocks getting tangled up in their patron's goals, that's something that we can only invent in our minds. I DO think I can reason about people running off to get revenge. It almost never happens in the real world. Of the several people I've ever encountered who might theoretically have reasons to seek revenge on someone, none of them was willing to do so, nor desired to do so. Thus I have to conclude that 'Bob' is a VERY VERY unusual person to start with! So, how much more of a stretch is it that his brother was killed by someone that Tim's patron is tangled up with? I don't feel like I need to be too worried about this!

Beyond that, this is not some world, this is a game of heroic adventure. This sort of thing just happens in heroic adventures. Fate is not just random chance, heroes arise under special circumstances and have unusual luck and special fates. These guys are potentially legends. It happens that Bob stumbles upon Tim and it turns out their fates are intertwined? This isn't 'stretching' anything, its how the heroic Universe works!

No, you’re right in that regard. That’s not my area of concern....I realize that the characters and events in the story are most likely extraordinary (though not always, as [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] points out). But I mean more from the player and GM view. If everyone is “playing to find out”, then I don’t know how much room there may be for surprise when you all know that Tim’s patron will somehow tie into Bob’s drow issues, and that Mary’s quest for the Eye of Maguffin is somehow going to come into it too. You may not know exactly how the finished dish will taste, but you certainly have the list of ingredients.

Not that playing to see exactly how these elements tie together can’t be fun, but perhaps an additoonal answer to the OP would be “to introduce an element to the story entirely unanticipated by thhe players”?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Please keep in mind that this statement is not true in all cases. Not everyone plays D&D - or any other RPG - as a game of heroic adventure all the time, if ever at all.

Which means any analysis based on this assumption runs the risk of quickly becoming at best only applicable to some games and at worst somewhat irrelevant.

Well, obviously any look at any GAME is subject to "when used like this..." qualifications. Techniques and procedures may have various purposes as well, etc. I think we all understand this. 2 points are worth touching on:

1) D&D (refer to any of the various prefaces and introductory material for pre-2e versions of D&D) is explicitly described as a heroic adventure game. This would reasonably be the expectation of anyone who looked at the material and decided to play pretty much ANY edition, but Gygax certainly stated it this way with no reservations. (I agree, mechanically it doesn't always live up to this).

2) The subject of the thread itself was to elicit answers to the question "what is world building for." It wasn't really stated this was limited to certain types of play.

Beyond that, I don't really think that the idea that PCs in D&D are anything less than very special (whether you use the word 'hero' or not for this is your choice) is viable. They are spell casters, very skilled warriors, accomplished thieves, etc right from level 1. Its pretty clear that AT WORST they have skills that only maybe one in a thousand people possess even at their initial levels of ability. Beyond that they are outright stated to be almost unique in their ability to advance and participate in the adventuring life. In 1e you can hire henchmen who have the ability to advance in level, if lead by a PC and then at half the normal PC rate, but again these are quite rare, a whole city might have single-digit numbers of such people in it (going by the charts in the DMG).

So, I think it IS justified, going by the material in D&D specifically, to expect that characters lead unusual lives and are likely to be singled out by fate. Rare enough that we cannot even point out equivalent sorts of people in the real world, which indicates to me that they ARE special.

I just don't buy the assertion that some people have made that somehow the vast majority of players want to pretend to be just any old guy. I think most players actually want to play 'special' characters. They may want to identify with them and connect them to everyday life in some sense, but I don't think that's the same thing as the idea that somehow the world cannot single them out. In all my years of running campaigns I never heard someone say such a thing at the table, and I've played with a pretty good variety of people.

 

[hawkeyefan]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]
I think you make many great points, and I agree with a lot of your preferences in regard to character connections to each other and the world and story.

But I also think that a lot of what you say presumes a high level of coordination by players. I’m lucky enough to have a dedicated group of close friends for whom this kind of preparation is pretty much assumed as a default. I am guessing your situation is similar.

But for many folks, this may not be the case. They may be playing with a group that is entirely new to them, either in public play or through an online host. In those cases, such coordination may not be possible.

So perhaps in these cases, having a GM who has worked out some ideas ahead of time is a good idea.

Also, see my reply above to [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] for another possible answer to your initial question.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

When is it good rather than bad GMing to answer "no" and shut down some avenue of inquiry (footprints, catalogues, looking for the map in a not-a-big-deal study, etc)? I would say that's highly contextual, but in my own case generally I'm trying to (i) avoid play drifting into areas where I have nothing useful to offer as a GM (thus, everything else being equal, I tend to avoid encouraging long wilderness journeys), and/or (ii) the avoided avenue does not speak to any establsihed or evinced player concern. If one of the PCs is a devotee of Ioun, or is an expert tracker, or really is treating the studyu as a big deal, then saying "no catalogue" or "no footprints" or "no map" looks like bad GMing to me.

Yeah, I rarely, almost never, shut players down. The only time would be if they REALLY want to dig right into something that just doesn't at all engage anyone else. Even then it should be OK if its not too lengthy and represents a reasonable amount of spotlight. Otherwise if something is just not too important, but bears on some conflict, then its probably a single check in an SC, at some level of abstraction high enough to produce a resolution and advancement of the plot.

So, if you are a 'devotee of Ioun' and want to find information in the study (IE the map) then it might be a mere check, but this would be something like using some technique learned as a part of Ioun worship (maybe magical or maybe just a research skill) to do so. This is minimal engagement, but still SOMETHING, and provides the player with some fodder for character development, and an illustration of what their life choices mean for them.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

No, you’re right in that regard. That’s not my area of concern....I realize that the characters and events in the story are most likely extraordinary (though not always, as [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] points out). But I mean more from the player and GM view. If everyone is “playing to find out”, then I don’t know how much room there may be for surprise when you all know that Tim’s patron will somehow tie into Bob’s drow issues, and that Mary’s quest for the Eye of Maguffin is somehow going to come into it too. You may not know exactly how the finished dish will taste, but you certainly have the list of ingredients.

Not that playing to see exactly how these elements tie together can’t be fun, but perhaps an additoonal answer to the OP would be “to introduce an element to the story entirely unanticipated by thhe players”?

Well, the GM's primary role is not putting forward an agenda, but obviously the framing function leaves a huge amount of room for GM agendas to appear. Chances are the GM established the general parameters of the setting and agreed to the genre/tone of the game as well, just like the players.

As for the players, they brought the ingredients, so the flavor of the stew should come as little surprise to them in some general sense. That being said, there are likely to be many twists. I would say that an ingenious GM is likely to introduce those at times. Maybe the Drow offer Mary the McGuffin in return for killing Bob? I don't know, I don't have a creative stroke of genius to apply to that right now. Obviously, setting the PCs directly against each other is tricky business, but its always possible to create SOME tension there. Less central issues could be in play, maybe some NPC that could help with Tim or Mary's agendas is Bob's bad guy. They can debate ways to deal with that, or Bob can be a dork and take unilateral action (but remember, that doesn't imply a rift between the PLAYERS).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@pemerton
I think you make many great points, and I agree with a lot of your preferences in regard to character connections to each other and the world and story.

But I also think that a lot of what you say presumes a high level of coordination by players. I’m lucky enough to have a dedicated group of close friends for whom this kind of preparation is pretty much assumed as a default. I am guessing your situation is similar.

But for many folks, this may not be the case. They may be playing with a group that is entirely new to them, either in public play or through an online host. In those cases, such coordination may not be possible.

So perhaps in these cases, having a GM who has worked out some ideas ahead of time is a good idea.

Also, see my reply above to @AbdulAlhazred for another possible answer to your initial question.

I actually think that playing in a more player-centered way is naturally easier, assuming that people can drop any preconceived notions they acquired from previous games. I think that playing RPGs is a very 'passed down' kind of a thing. Its very engaging, but surprisingly hard to just invent (in a real RPG form like we have now, obviously kids play make-believe). Someone new to the game encounters, pretty much inevitably, D&D and people that are or have played D&D. The fundamentals of D&D play are garnered usually via other players going all the way back to the early days of the mid-70's, and spread widely via cons, modules, the presentation in the rules, and just 'stuff people heard' (if nothing else).

Yet, if you introduce someone to RPGs in the form that [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] or [MENTION=6682826]CH[/MENTION]auchou, or [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] play, its really no harder to pick up. Yes, players can be jerks and not play along, but classic D&D-style GM-centered play has that problem too!

I do think there are actually ECONOMIC reasons why a game like D&D thrives though. You can't really write adventures, let alone detailed settings, for a game where the premise is basically "the players decide where to take things and the GM engages with their agenda." How do you write a module for that? I mean, yeah, you could generate some forms of material, encounter ideas, NPCs, even a degree of world building (but there's always a danger of meta-plot and getting too detailed and nailed-down here). It seems to me that the most characteristic type of product is the module, and I literally never buy them! I sort of appreciated Dungeon as a feature of DDI that I could steal a few elements from now and then, but mostly those were in the Compendium anyway (4e online database that holds all monsters, spells, NPCs, etc in it).

I also think that narratively focused games tend to thrive more as niche products, and really not too many casual gamers delve into those. I don't think they're harder to play, its just there's a network effect and a bandwagon effect, and so a game where its fairly easy to replicate the same narrative reliably over and over and thus write a module that embodies it is the ideal vehicle for that. In that sense maybe playing 'classic' DM-centered games IS an easier way to find players, though I don't seem to have a hard time doing it when I'm motivated.

 

[Lanefan]

2 points are worth touching on:

1) D&D (refer to any of the various prefaces and introductory material for pre-2e versions of D&D) is explicitly described as a heroic adventure game. This would reasonably be the expectation of anyone who looked at the material and decided to play pretty much ANY edition, but Gygax certainly stated it this way with no reservations. (I agree, mechanically it doesn't always live up to this).

Gygax stated it this way and then proceeded to provide all kinds of perhaps-unintentional encouragement to play it a bit less than heroically.

Exhibit A: giving x.p. for treasure, thus encouraging looting and pillaging over heroism every time: advice our crew has gleefully followed for 35 years or more, even though we dumped the xp-for-gp rule in about year 2.

2) The subject of the thread itself was to elicit answers to the question "what is world building for." It wasn't really stated this was limited to certain types of play.

I was specifically replying to your analysis that I quoted, which seemed to be restricted to only a couple of types of play and thus imply those were the only ones that mattered.

Beyond that, I don't really think that the idea that PCs in D&D are anything less than very special (whether you use the word 'hero' or not for this is your choice) is viable. They are spell casters, very skilled warriors, accomplished thieves, etc right from level 1. Its pretty clear that AT WORST they have skills that only maybe one in a thousand people possess even at their initial levels of ability. Beyond that they are outright stated to be almost unique in their ability to advance and participate in the adventuring life.

These (quoted) are a series of assumptions which may be true in some settings and games and people's points of view but not in others.

I've always seen PCs as adventurers; a step or two above the normal commoner but by no means unique: there's lots of other adventurers out there. There has to be, or else where do all the levelled villains come from, and where do all the higher-level people who train the PCs come from, not to mention all the replacement PCs you might need if you do a good job grinding the meat.

In 1e you can hire henchmen who have the ability to advance in level, if lead by a PC and then at half the normal PC rate, but again these are quite rare, a whole city might have single-digit numbers of such people in it (going by the charts in the DMG).

See above. And if the charts show there's so few, that kinda clashes with the number of henches allowed by one's Charisma score (a high-Charisma character can have a dozen henches or more, if memory serves)

So, I think it IS justified, going by the material in D&D specifically, to expect that characters lead unusual lives and are likely to be singled out by fate. Rare enough that we cannot even point out equivalent sorts of people in the real world, which indicates to me that they ARE special.

I think societal and legal pressures would tend to keep such people tightly under wraps in the real world.

That said, once the zombie apocalypse has come and gone and it's everyone for him/herself....

I just don't buy the assertion that some people have made that somehow the vast majority of players want to pretend to be just any old guy. I think most players actually want to play 'special' characters.

I think most players want to do both: start with one - the 'everyman', perhaps, or the novice at its class - and end up with the other: the special hero.

They may want to identify with them and connect them to everyday life in some sense, but I don't think that's the same thing as the idea that somehow the world cannot single them out. In all my years of running campaigns I never heard someone say such a thing at the table, and I've played with a pretty good variety of people.

While it can be fun to play a special snowflake once in a while, always playing one gets boring fast; even more so if you've got a DM who gives the PCs plot protection so they just about can't die or have anything else really bad happen to them.

Lanefan