What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Maxperson]

I daresay you already know the answer...

Yep. The answer is that it shouldn't. The game world doesn't care about the PCs' success or failure. It just is. The only issue here is whether the DM is going to override the neutrality of the game world and force the PCs to always be allowed to get to where they want unhindered(Story Now), or whether the DM is going play out the journey and leave success or failure to be determined impartially(DM Facing).

 

[Maxperson]

Turning to RPGing techniques, once again it seems that you are not able to think outside the context of a GM-driven railroad.

I can't think inside or outside of something that doesn't exist.

For instance, imagine how a RPG session played "story now" might actually produce the Moria sequence. It's a bit long (and sblocked for that reason), but that's because genuine actual play reports, with serioous analysis, tend to be. This one is imaginary, but aspires to the same sort of seriousness.

First, it illustrates how important failures are in "story now" RPGing, as they generate the unwanted consequences that drive things forward in ways that are unexpected, in some sense undesired, and yet continue to speak to player-established concerns.

Second, and related, it reminds us how the trip through Moria is a story of failure upon failure - as Aragorn later laments. By my count (with fails and successes bolded in my account) there are at least 5 failures, interrupted only by a success with a cost, before the players eventually succeed at a combat. The final confrontation is then another success with a cost (ie Gandalf dies). It would be quite unlucky to get this happening in 4e, as 4e is quite a mathematically generous system. BW is capable of giving this sort of thing, though. It is mathematically pretty brutal.

Third, it shows how "no myth" works. From a bit of backstory and some Beliefs/descriptors, the participants at the table have all that they need to establish a setting with mountain passes, magically sealed gates, watchers in the water, orc-and-balrog infested halls where a dwarven colony has perished, etc. But at no point is any of that stuff pre-given: had Gimli's player's Circles check succeeded, for instance, then the fiction would have unfolded completely differently. The dwarves would have been able to guide them through Moria. Because of the earlier "soft" move in which the GM established that there is danger in Moria, some sort of check would still have been required - there's no real point speculating what sort of check, because we don't know how the ensuing interaction with the dwarven colonists would have gone. All we can say is that the story would have been very different.

I didn't say you couldn't create goals for them that match what happened on the journey. I said that the only goals given are the two I mentioned. Every last "goal" you mentioned as an example of Story Now, also works as stuff the DM pre-authored as interesting things for the the players and PCs to encounter along the way. You have to invent goals that are not present in the books in order to make the LotR into Story Now, I just have to point to the books and say see it matches my style of play. I don't have to make up a single thing.

[MENTION=1282]darkbard[/MENTION]'s reply to this deals with the obvious point. I'lll add - the notion of writing a novel by way of a RPGing technique is obviously nonsense, and it's not even clear what rhetorical point it's meant to serve.

You can't really write a book based on Story Now, that's for certain. With my style of play, though, there is certainly enough to establish an entire plot, journey, and culmination of the goal to write a book around it. I've read novels that play out like an adventure. Plenty of them.

 

[Maxperson]

That says nothing about the player not being interested. The player is not the protagonist. The PC is the protagonist.

Dude. You've told me repeatedly that PCs can't have interests, because they are imaginary. Only the player can. You keep trying to have things both ways in this thread.

I'll respond to the rest later.

 

[pemerton]

With my style of play, though, there is certainly enough to establish an entire plot, journey, and culmination of the goal to write a book around it.

This is why I describe GM-driven play as "the GM reading out his/her notes to the players".

 

[pemerton]

The answer is that it shouldn't. The game world doesn't care about the PCs' success or failure. It just is. The only issue here is whether the DM is going to override the neutrality of the game world and force the PCs to always be allowed to get to where they want unhindered(Story Now), or whether the DM is going play out the journey and leave success or failure to be determined impartially(DM Facing).

The gameworld is not "neutral". Nor "biased". Those are properties of judges, or of policies, but not of authored works.

You are claiming, in effect, that RPGers have a moral duty to play in a style that you like. It's absurd.

Your use of the word "force" is also absurd. "Hey everyone, should the story be about X?" "Yep, OK!" "OK, you come upon this Xiness. What do you do?" Are you really saying that everyone was forced to engage with X?

 

[clearstream]

In playing Tomb of Horrors, a player might say "My PC uses a 10' pole to probe the floor as I walk down it. I also tap the wall with the paintings on it."

But neither of these is advocacy in Eero Tuovinen's sense. No "picture of the character" has been painted, let alone a clear and powerful one. The character has not had any personality, interests or agenda expressed. Nothing has been conveyed about what the character thinks or feels.

In usual language I would take a broader reading of the word "controlling" to include determining any and all of the motives and behaviour i.e. every act attributable to the character including such acts as are intended to paint the character. Having a thought is a thing the character does. I don't feel prescriptive about it: I'd be happy to limit the definition of "controlling" for this particular discussion.

Anyway. For me, strictly, there was no need to go beyond "does". I realise he wanted to make his point clearer, but thinking is doing, just as much as opening a door is. How do other players know that I am struggling with slaying the dragon that I know is really my romantic interest, who has been cursed to ravage the land in that dreadful form? I enunciate it. In every case that I've encountered, that is as much a speech act as the "doing" of my character opening a door. In order to paint the clear and powerful picture, spoken word was used. In order to open the door, spoken word was used. A possible weakness of narrativism is to take so literal a reading of the action. A dragon in a story is already symbolic.

A minimum requirement for character advocacy as Tuovinen describes it is that the GM establishes situations that permit the player to paint that picture by expressing an agenda, thoughts, feelings. You can have character advocacy in games that aren't "story now" or "standard narrativistic model" (eg classic White Wolf games), but there is likely to be tension if the player's advocacy comes into collision with the GM's conception of how the fiction should be.

(One way of describing the function of alignment mechanics, in 2nd ed AD&D (and perhaps since then, too, to the extent that the 2nd ed practice has continued) is to put a limit on character advocacy so as to avoid those sorts of collisions. ("Your character wouldn't do that because she's LG" is the most extreme version of how this can work.))

In any event, I think it's fairly clear that the more that the GM decides what flows from advocating for one's character, the less control the player has over the content of the shared fiction. Personally, I also think that the more the GM decides what flows from advocating for one's character, the less control the player has over the character, as it is the GM who is deciding what it means to be someone with this agenda, these interests, these particular thoughts and feelings.

For me, mechanics like alignment have always been about inspiring coherent motivations. I can and have run extensive RPG without rules. Rules serve a purpose. As does world building. I would keep coming back to that word inspiration. When the four characters imagine their backstories etc, I think the springboard of a built world transports the whole group into a new, shared place. Otherwise Bob might be harming Alice's gumshoe fiction with his heroic fantasy.

So for me, the answer to the OP is always consistency and inspiration. As Tolkien pointed out, it is critical for fantasy worlds to be consistent. If they are not consistent they stop being believable, and unravel. One way to achieve consistency is to work it out beforehand i.e. world build. Not every detail, but the fact that your character can be warforged, mine can be blood of the banished, etc. Springboards for imagination.

I generally find, both in professional and personal creative effort, that constraints elevate.

 

[clearstream]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] Thinking further, perhaps the difference arises from the model of how the character and player relate. If we picture that the emotional journey is happening in the mind of the player (as the character has no mind) and the in-world acts are happening in the described actions of the character (or whatever agency the player has to work through, in the game world) then we could restrict as I think you do "controlling" to relate to the latter and not the former.

The springboard of a consistent world that is in some sense external to all the characters is then critical. It is a terrible lack to try to do without it. So the model looks like this

1. The mind of the player, in which an emotional journey takes place
2. The agent of the player, capable of in-world actions
3. The consistent framing, that serves as a basis for coherent inspiration that will reverberate powerfully

The world-build serves 3. We should be asking questions about how the world changes, as much as how our characters change.

 

[Lanefan]

Free narration gets us to the west gate, but the GM describes it as closed. A failed History check by Gandalf's player is narrated as him not knowing the password. Frodo's player offers an after-the-fact augment (in our 4e game that is acceptable if an action point is spent), but the success comes at a cost: the watcher stirs and attacks the PCs. There are different ways to do success at a cost - in BW, it is one way of establishing "fail forward" narration; in 4e, it could similarly be part of the narration of a skill challenge.

The PCs retreat into the mines without defeating the watcher, leaving it free to block the door behind them.

Is the aborted combat with the watcher a success (they avoided the creature and thus would get xp for it) or a failure (they stirred it up in the first place)?

And this is so obviously wrong it's hard to credit its assertion. It has been a repeated theme, though, from [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] also - I (and others) emphasise how important action declarations and resolution are, and how important the contrast between success (= player's desire for the fiction is realied) and failure (= GM narrates some defeating consequence), and you simply don't seem to believe it.

I believe it. That doesn't mean I like it.

Failed checks is how, in "story now" RPGing, adverse consequences become part of the fiction. This is why PCs don't always get what they want; and why players' plans don't always work out. (It's not because they guessed wrong about what is in the GM's notes.)

This is great as long as you can guarantee there will be some failures along the way to make things interesting and-or challenging. But one assumes the players are within reason maxing their odds of success as best they can, meaning that what has the potential to be an exciting and interesting adventure (LotR as written) could instead turn into a rather boring cakewalk (they just go around the south end of the mountains and reach the Rohan unopposed) if the dice allow it.

And to return to the players of the giants-in-the-Underdark game: suppose, having been spotted by giants, they decide to retreat rather than fight. (Or maybe they try to fight but the giants get the better of them.) Now, as a consequence of failure, is the occasion for the GM to place obstacles in their way. Not pointless ones, of course, but obstacles that also speak to the player-evinced dramatic needs of the PCs. The imagined Moria recount above shows how this is done.

Either way, the failure vs. the giants is not the players' fault this time - it's on the DM for not giving the players a chance to prepare and-or determine the PCs' method and direction of approach.

The DM can mitigate her error by not having the giants chase the PCs if they retreat, but even then the giants will suddenly be much more alert than before and the PCs will have a harder time trying any sort of stealth approach. Or if the PCs decide to fight and are getting pasted due to lack of preparedness she can find a reason for the giants to pull back. Either way, it's poorly done.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

I already discussed this c 200 posts upthread. I sketched the example in 4e. 4e doesn't have generic surprise rules. The players could have declared stealth. They didn't.

They couldn't, unless they were rude and interrupted you while you were talking.

Maybe when they are spotted by the giants, they want to attack with an initiative bonus. There are various warlord and other powers that permit this. Maybe they want to use one of those. I don't know - it's a made-up example, and I didn't write that bit yet.

System dependent, I suppose...4e's not my cup of tea for a boatload of reasons, this just points out two (1. no surprise rules 2. the warlord class and all it entails)

The first quetion in "story now" play is, does the GM call for a check or simply "say 'yes'". This is a decision about drama, pacing, what's at stake.

Much of the time there is no reason not to just say "yes". In my MHRP game, no one was interested in the question of whether or not the Stark Corp private jet had been tampered with by rivals. They wanted to find out what happened at the Yashida headquarters in Tokyo. So that was the next scene I framed.

There is nothing unrealistic about having an uneventful flight from DC to Tokyo. Many hundreds of people are doing it every day!

You've twisted the example; it has nothing to do with flight! I was originally talking about a medieval-fantasy journey from Washington to Tokyo (in comparison with a similar journey from Boston to New York) and even joked there about not having the Stark jet available.

Yes, a jet plane makes the trip quite a trivial thing. But having to do it on foot/wagon/ship is not trivial at all, which was and still is my point.

For someone who's into realism, that's not very realistic! In the real world, money gets lost, unexpected or forgotten debts fall due, credit is granted or refused, etc.

Yep, happens in the game too. I was trying not to make the example too cloudy.

But in any event, in Cortex+ Heroic, hiring porters is either pure colour - so it just gets narrated by the player - or else is the creation of a resource, which requires the expenditure of a plot point. Nothing in that system involves adding or subtracting numbers to a running tally except earning and spending XP.

So in a bizarre way it's come full circle from 1e D&D - there g.p. = x.p. and here x.p. = g.p.

What about ammunition e.g. arrows, bolts, bullets - is that tracked?

Well obviously it's far less realistic than White Plume Mountain, The Ghost Tower of Inverness, and Zuggtmoy the Demoness Lady of Fungi!

Hey, I'm not saying old-school D&D doesn't have its whacked-out moments! This is why I always put the qualifier "where it can" on my statement that a game world should try to reflect reality, as I'm well aware there'll be all kinds of situations where it can't.

As far as iron spikes are concerned, they're not going to come up very often (I think it must be 20 years or more since I've thought about iron spikes, except maybe running one AD&D session a year or two ago). But suppose that a player wants to create a Door Spiked Shut asset (eg to impede the actions of some threatening monster) - that would be a check against the Doom Pool. If it fails, there are a number of possible narrations - one might be "You're out of iron spikes!"

A more relevant example: at the moment in my game the party are counting every drop of oil they brought with them, as they're up against trolls. Lots of trolls...

Actually, I think you missed my point.

Maybe the weather across the continent is magical? Maybe last year's rainstorm was caused by a druid the PCs never knew anything about (go "living, breathing world"!)?

A druid that could generate a 4-day rainstorm would be high-level enough to have already ascended to divinity! But the rainstorm being divinely-caused would likely end up being the explanation I'd have to fall back on, and fortunately there's other mythos besides just Christian that have floods as part of their story.

And if the trip to the east becomes more challenging, well that's what happens when you establish fiction. It has consequences for play. That's the point.

Consequences for future play are great - I'm all for that!

It's consequences that should have impacted past play but didn't that I abhor.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

You can't really write a book based on Story Now, that's for certain.

Actually maybe you could, if you did it in a pure stream-of-consciousness style and could somehow find a way to write as fast as you think.

Lan-"maybe Alice in Wonderland was written in Story-Now mode"-efan