Why Jargon is Bad, and Some Modern Resources for RPG Theory

[AbdulAlhazred]

The GM decides for NPCs, the Players decide for PCs. It isn't the GM determining how the situation will go if he is playing fairly, because how the situation goes isn't the point, the point is an honest character interaction. The players are still free to do what they want (they could stab the NPC to death and take what they need from them for example). But the point is the GM should have a clear idea going in of what the NPCs motives and and not fit those motives to some kind of outcome the GM wants.

Sure, but 99.9% of the time the ACTUAL situation at the table is that one of the players comes up with some sort of plan, and that plan depends on some sort of interaction with an NPC going one way or the other way, and all the GM has to go on is basically "this is one of the guards." Maybe he's got a CRUMB more than that, "this guard is especially vigilant, but he has a soft spot for attractive women." Now, he's got to judge this situation. OF COURSE one of the main things that is going to be on his mind is "will this hairbrained scheme that Joe came up with bypass half my prep?" There's no actual way to say what the NPC would 'realistically' do. As you say, people vary in their reactions from day-to-day or even hour-to-hour for a huge variety of reasons! Nobody can say there's any one 'realistic' vs 'unrealistic' outcome. So, the decision comes down to the GM arbitrating based on his or her view of what will produce a fun/interesting/engaging/name your agenda here outcome!

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm sorry, I really have hard time getting how someone wouldn't get it. This probably is some sort of blind spot to me, I don't know... I'm not trying to be dismissive, but I also genuinely cannot fathom how it is not obvious that talking feels more like talking than talking feels like fighting...

It feels we are talking past each other, and I'd like to unpack this further, but I really don't know how.

Fair enough. But at least I think you have seen enough of us respond to understand that to some of us at least, its, at best, a matter of degree, so unless you think we're not arguing in good faith, you're just gonna have to accept this is not a first principal case you can just assume when talking to other people in the discussion.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure - but as it's a game of imagination anyway, what's wrong with us just taking our misunderstandings and running with them anyway?

Well, the fact people won't have the same misunderstanding, for one thing.

That's always the thing with mechanics; they may not be right, they may not fit everyone's understanding of what's being represented, but everyone can at least understand what they are.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Combat isn't more complicated, but I do think it is more chaotic and harder to predict. And that might be part of it here. Usually I find most social situations play out as I imagine they would. If I am planning on having a difficult conversation with someone, and I know them, I am rarely surprised by the reactions they have over the course of the conversation. People do surprise you from time to time, and something very random, like giving a person a hug out of the blue, especially if you've never hugged them before, that might be more difficult to gauge (even then I feel like I have a sense of who would hug me back and who would react negatively to a sudden hug).

But I do think there is something to this point as it relates to fighting. It might be hard to predict what will happen in a fight with someone you've never fought with before. But if you spent several days a week sparing with the same person, in the same way you spend time each week talking to a friend, you probably would have a good idea of how things might play out in a fight. There may be a more chaotic and random element because it is a physical act and you might slip or the person might try to do something you aren't expecting intentionally, but it is more predictable the more familiar you are with a person's movement and habits. How you could translate that into an all talking combat system though I am not sure.

How random really is combat though? I mean, sure, there must be SOME random element. However, I recall years ago when I was engaged in SCA combats (not that they are exactly realistic, but I think they do engage the sorts of skillset that would realistically matter in actual melee combat) there was a guy. He was invincible. I mean, truly invincible. Nobody ever touched him. He ended up 'King of the East' simply by beating every single one of many rather talented people one after another without even basically breaking a sweat. Even the guy whom I knew who was extraordinarily fast and cunning and would pull some really surprising move couldn't touch this person. He was just so fast, so strong, and so remarkably athletic that there was a 0.0% chance you would ever win against him. I don't care if the man slipped on a banana peel, he'd still have won. What I'm saying is, I am not so sure how random these kinds of things really are! Sure, between equally (un)skilled fighters, yeah, but there's a point of disparity at which you don't need dice anymore!

 

[Bedrockgames]

Sure, but 99.9% of the time the ACTUAL situation at the table is that one of the players comes up with some sort of plan, and that plan depends on some sort of interaction with an NPC going one way or the other way, and all the GM has to go on is basically "this is one of the guards." Maybe he's got a CRUMB more than that, "this guard is especially vigilant, but he has a soft spot for attractive women." Now, he's got to judge this situation. OF COURSE one of the main things that is going to be on his mind is "will this hairbrained scheme that Joe came up with bypass half my prep?" There's no actual way to say what the NPC would 'realistically' do. As you say, people vary in their reactions from day-to-day or even hour-to-hour for a huge variety of reasons! Nobody can say there's any one 'realistic' vs 'unrealistic' outcome. So, the decision comes down to the GM arbitrating based on his or her view of what will produce a fun/interesting/engaging/name your agenda here outcome!

I don't think the number is 99 percent. But whatever it is, I think it is bad GMing to stop at "this is one of the guards" (especially if the players are interrogating that aspect of the scenario). I always stop, take a moment and right down some concrete things so I have something to work with when the players try something. And if the players start probing further, you need to come up with traits and motives if you don't have them. That doesn't mean they all have to have obvious ways of being bribed or deceived, but there should be some details there.

And again, no one is talking about what the NPC would "realistically do" this keeps getting brought up but everyone who is engaging in this type of play has said realism isn't the goal. When I've explained the goal it is more about the fun of playing out situations with characters who have motivations and goals and aren't just 'one of the guards'. This isn't about simulating realistic social interactions. It is about what aspect of play we find enjoyable.

So it isn't about realism. But it is about "I know the guard needs gold to pay off his debts to Fan Batu", and then I can assess whether the players offering him gold would be enough to sway him (or if they have a plan involving gold to distract him if that would work). Its about engaging the RP, puzzle solving and character driven side of play. It isn't about running war-games of prison break scenarios to find out what would realistically happen.

OF COURSE one of the main things that is going to be on his mind is "will this hairbrained scheme that Joe came up with bypass half my prep?"

I used the example of the players bypassing a whole campaign to kill a big bad in my own experience to make the point that his isn't how I would do it. And I would further say, I don't think prioritizing prep that way is beneficial (I take a pretty minimal approach to prep once i have a campaign set up for this reason). But yes, if the GM is allowing metaconcerns like whether the players will bypass parts of the adventure prep as a way of judging how the NPC reacts, then that is an issue. I've learned to not care about whether they bypass things or not. And it helps with a lot with having sessions I find enjoyable as a GM.

 

[Thomas Shey]

How random really is combat though? I mean, sure, there must be SOME random element. However, I recall years ago when I was engaged in SCA combats (not that they are exactly realistic, but I think they do engage the sorts of skillset that would realistically matter in actual melee combat) there was a guy. He was invincible. I mean, truly invincible. Nobody ever touched him. He ended up 'King of the East' simply by beating every single one of many rather talented people one after another without even basically breaking a sweat. Even the guy whom I knew who was extraordinarily fast and cunning and would pull some really surprising move couldn't touch this person. He was just so fast, so strong, and so remarkably athletic that there was a 0.0% chance you would ever win against him. I don't care if the man slipped on a banana peel, he'd still have won. What I'm saying is, I am not so sure how random these kinds of things really are! Sure, between equally (un)skilled fighters, yeah, but there's a point of disparity at which you don't need dice anymore!

There's a couple of things you have to keep in mind.

1. The fact that most combat sports are not extremely realistic matters; among other things, they usually try to minimize some of the factors that dice represent because, honestly, they can easily get you hurt. SCA is a little better than some because they'll do actual outdoors fighting in the like, but how often did you fight somewhere where there was a lot of low hanging branches? Muddy patches? Loose gravel? I'm betting even in the Wars there was some avoidance of bad footing and similar things, and in regular indoor bouts. Same with trying to avoid issues with weapons and armor. Most of the time people in real combats have a lot more trouble avoiding these sorts of things, but when they show up is, if not literally random, is well below the level that is going to be managed manually by a GM (if, even, they should). A lot of that significant but low level clutter is handled by dice rolls.

2. Being random doesn't mean some differences in capability can't pile up. One of the issues with big linear die roll systems like D20 and D100 resolutions is that they overemphasize the randomness. You have to have really massive differences in capability before its always obvious how much those differences actually matter can come in. This was very obvious to me early on being both a RuneQuest and Hero System convert early; while I loved both games, RQ's percentage system meant you could sometimes end up with a lot of, well, crap rolls that made the gap between you and less skillful opponents seem less than it was. It didn't mean you still didn't win a lot of fights, but it overemphasized the outliers. On the other hand in Hero, if you had one guy with an 8 CV and one guy with a 3, the chances the latter guy would ever even get a hit in before he went down was--pretty slim. That's because the 3D6 resolution could push the probabilities to where the chances of failure were pretty minuscule. That wasn't what you expected most fights to be, but it could occur, and you'd still have room for outliers but have them be genuinely outliers. Some die pool systems can produce a similar result. Even in more modest differences, the probabilities can be more more slanted because they aren't going to produce a linear set of steps (you could get that result with a percentile system by messing with tables, but tables are usually a bad word in the hobby, so...)

 

[Bedrockgames]

How random really is combat though? I mean, sure, there must be SOME random element. However, I recall years ago when I was engaged in SCA combats (not that they are exactly realistic, but I think they do engage the sorts of skillset that would realistically matter in actual melee combat) there was a guy. He was invincible. I mean, truly invincible. Nobody ever touched him. He ended up 'King of the East' simply by beating every single one of many rather talented people one after another without even basically breaking a sweat. Even the guy whom I knew who was extraordinarily fast and cunning and would pull some really surprising move couldn't touch this person. He was just so fast, so strong, and so remarkably athletic that there was a 0.0% chance you would ever win against him. I don't care if the man slipped on a banana peel, he'd still have won. What I'm saying is, I am not so sure how random these kinds of things really are! Sure, between equally (un)skilled fighters, yeah, but there's a point of disparity at which you don't need dice anymore!

I do kind of tie back to this in my second paragraph. I think I agree with the last part of your post: the bigger the differences in size, skill, experience, and athleticism, the less random (or at least the more predictable) the outcome. If I walk into a ring and mike Tyson walks into a ring. A quick visual comparison of us will pretty much tell you I won't be the person walking out of the ring. And like I said in my second paragraph, when people get familiar with one another in sparring, the outcome is more predictable. But there are still things like a punchers chance, and chaos that is just a little harder to track I think than you have in a conversation (not that conversations can't be chaotic but fighting is an explosive, physical contest, whereas social interactions are more of an exchange of ideas, opinions, points and emotions). And I don't think this so much about what fighting is versus what social interaction is, I was just trying to address why it might be that there is this frequent sense that "you can do social interaction without mechanics, but you have to do combat with them". I think a lot of that comes down to what we perceive combat to be.

But like I said elsewhere, I think it has a lot more to do with we want combat to unrpedictable and exciting in a game, and we, or at least many of us, want social interaction to be more like dialogue and behavior we have full control over. And the other side of this is modeling that control you have over dialogue and behavior, in combat, seems rather difficult (because the modeling we are talking about is pretty 1:1). For whatever reason people seem more comfortable with letting the GM decide how Emperor Fabio responds to you throwing a burrito in his face, than letting the GM decide if the burrito lands in his face. Maybe we feel a sense of randomness when we throw a burrito at someone that we don't feel when we decide how to respond to having a burrito thrown at us. I don't know

 

[Thomas Shey]

I used the example of the players bypassing a whole campaign to kill a big bad in my own experience to make the point that his isn't how I would do it. And I would further say, I don't think prioritizing prep that way is beneficial (I take a pretty minimal approach to prep once i have a campaign set up for this reason). But yes, if the GM is allowing metaconcerns like whether the players will bypass parts of the adventure prep as a way of judging how the NPC reacts, then that is an issue. I've learned to not care about whether they bypass things or not. And it helps with a lot with having sessions I find enjoyable as a GM.

I think the issue is that people aren't always as good at keeping things out of their decision process as they think, or even want. Assuming they even want to, which isn't always a given.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Obviously there are a bunch of different possible agendas! I think we all recognize that. I wouldn't take the questioning on this topic as an attack on any given method, or criticism, more as an analytical process. By asking such questions as "why dice for combat but not social" we explicate how these things work, what our tastes are, how we think about these things, and that informs our thinking on the topic generally.

To be clear here, I am not saying you can't have social combat or mechanics for social interactions. You absolutely can. I tend to find mechanics obtrusive for that, but it is just personal opinion. Broadly I think the reason why the answer to that question is often "dice for combat, no dice for social" is something we can come up with logical explanations for, but fundamentally you are talking about a sense people get from the experience of trying to do both. For some reason, combat feels more at home with dice, and social interaction feels more at home without dice for a lot of people (speaking generally). But I don't think the split is huge. It isn't like a 90 percent want no dice and 10 percent want dice. It seems closer to 50-50 in all the discussions I have had.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think the issue is that people aren't always as good at keeping things out of their decision process as they think, or even want. Assuming they even want to, which isn't always a given.

There is a lot of excused middle here though. All I can say is I have had plenty of situations where the players bypassed a ton of prep because they made a choice like this, and I didn't have the guard be unbribeable. Can a GM be 100% objective and fair all the time? No of course not. GMs are human beings. Some days you make better rulings than others. The goal is to be as fair and open minded in your rulings as you can. To not allow those kinds of considerations to enter into your decision as much as you can. The fact that you might once in a while unconsciously let bias enter into a ruling, even if 90 percent of the time you are making pretty impartial rulings, I think doesn't undermine the enjoyment of this type of play. And on the player side it also requires a certain amount of trust in the GM. If you are examining every choice the GM makes under a critical microscope, because you are worried about some residual bias creeping in, you might not enjoy this type of play. Personally I don't get too hung up on these issues whether I am a player or a GM. Perfection isn't the goal. The goal is to enjoy gaming with our friends.