Why the World Exists

[Cadfan]

As an example... I set it up beforehand that in round 3 of the PC's battle with an Ogre (barring precautions that keep the battle silent) the noise attracts 3 Orcs in another room to come and investigate, and it takes them 4 rounds to reach the room. Now, since this encounter is set up before the actions or motivations of the PC's are known to me, and/or interact with it, it is a neutral situation and not based on the state of my PC's because I have no idea what that will be at the time they interact with it.

Agreed, with some minor quibbles about the meaning of "neutral." You could be "neutral" in the sense of "not based on the state of the PCs" while still being completely gamist or completely detached from the internal consistency of your setting. But that's probably neither here nor there, we probably all agree that setting up an encounter where reinforcements hear the noise of battle and join in is a reasonable thing for a DM to do.

Instead it is based on the logic and consistency of the "setting". the noise will attract the Orcs because it's loud and the sounds of battle...

I agree with the second sentence. With the first I have some disagreement. While there may be logic to your decision, there is also a degree of arbitrariness. Unless the orcs are genuinely necessary (in the philosophical sense of the term[that's a great band name, "Necessary Orcs"]) to the logic and realism of your setting, then you still picked arbitrarily amongst the many reasonable possibilities that would all have matched the logic and consistency of the setting. Most likely, within the set of "things that would be logical and consistent," the orcs are just one element. You chose them instead of a different one for reasons that were your own.

it takes n rounds for them to get there because they are that far from the room.

...disagreed. You can't say, "its neutral that it takes them N rounds to get there because they are X meters from the room" because you are the one who put them X meters from the room, knowing full well that they would then take N rounds to arrive. You could have put them Y or Z meters from the room, deleted the room, put them in the same room with the original orcs, put the room on the moon, whatever, and when you did, you would have known the in-game effects that were likely when you decided.

Of course your decision of X instead of Y or Z was probably perfectly reasonable. Just don't try to make it out to not be your decision. Adding one step of reasoning between your decision and the outcome doesn't negate the fact that your decision was the cause of the outcome.

Now if I decide the Orcs don't come because the PC's may not be able to handle the fight this is where my reasons are not logical, impartial or consistent.

Oh? Not impartial, I'll give you that. Logical or consistent? You might be perfectly logical or consistent. I'll get to why in a moment.

There are Orcs close enough to hear the noise that, regardless of what it may mean for their own safety choose not to investigate???

Disagreed. There are no such thing as orcs. They have no objective distance away, nor any other objective characteristics.

What there is, on the other hand, is a guy named Imaro. And this Imaro guy had the intention of doing something in a D&D game. And now maybe he's not going to, because he thinks that it might suck for everyone at the table if he does. So instead, he does a different, equally logical, equally consistent thing, that he's chosen because he thinks it will be more fun.

Now he might be boxed in. Maybe he's previously communicated every last relevant detail of the orcs to the players, and changing it now will ruin their suspension of disbelief. But if that's not the case, he's free to change his mind at any time. How could he not be?

Changing your mind about your unexpressed future intentions as a DM isn't changing the game world. Its just changing your mind. Its ok to do that.

For the record, since I know this is going to come up:

1. If there are zero reasonable alternatives to the originally intended orcs showing up as originally planned, then that may be all you can do. But there are probably other reasonable possibilities that will be exactly as logical and coherent as the original plan.
2. My suggestion that the DM opt for a different, also reasonable alternative is premised on the assumption that there is an actual problem with the orcs being used as originally planned. So don't tell me, "oh, the PCs can just retreat, why change the world so they don't have to?" That's fine! Apparently there was no problem in the first place.
3. Some people are going to say that changing your mind about the nature of the orc reinforcements deprives of the PCs of meaningful choice. That really, really doesn't apply unless the PCs already knew of the nature of the orc reinforcements.
4. This isn't about protecting the PCs from bad decisions. At no point did Imaro bring up whether it was reasonable or not for the PCs to be fighting the ogre and making noise, so I didn't address it. Obviously unwise decisions should have consequences (at least usually, some unwise decisions in real life don't have consequences, so making every unwise in-game decision have consequences can actually wreck the believability of your game world by emphasizing the presence of a punitive dm/god). Of course, that doesn't mean that unwise decisions should have lethal consequences every single time, and my argument about "within the larger set of reasonable outcomes, why not pick one that's fun?" applies here as well.

 

[Cadfan]

Read the encounter below. Then open the SBLOCKs, and read the DM's thoughts during the encounter. Make sure to do it in that order.

Obviously its not the best encounter in the world. Try not to judge it on that criteria. But the events should be something that's completely plausible from both a sandbox and a player-oriented perspective. They're a wee bit railroady, but sandboxes don't actually have a problem with the variety of railroading that occurs when NPCs follow through on logical motivations in a way that unavoidably affects the PCs.
[sblock]DM, in thoughts: *ok, the players are going to meet with the corrupt, sniveling merchant as he eats dinner. Unbeknownst to them, the evil assassins have put incredibly lethal poison in the merchant's wineglass in an attempt to silence him and frame the PCs. He'll drink some of it, and die. Ok, go.*[/sblock]
PC: I stride into the merchant's dining room like I own the place. This guy's a coward, so I'm going to intimidate him into telling us what we need to know. "Good evening, Dog! We know all about your dealings with the Armada! Its fortunate for you that you aren't important enough for us to bother to crush. Your backers are the true threat to the realm. Give us their names, end your arms trading, and we might see fit not to leave you destitute in a ditch, exposed, reviled, and alone!"

DM, as Merchant: "You, you...! You can't do this to me! I have friends!"

PC: "You have nothing. We own you now. Talk." To emphasize that I can do anything I want to him, I sit on his table right in front of him, tower over him, and help myself to a long drink of his most expensive wine.
[sblock]DM, in thoughts: *oh no! The wine was poisoned! If he drinks it, he'll die! What shall I do? Oh, wait. There's no reason the wine had to be poisoned. Maybe it was the fish. Its not like I'm depriving the players of a believable world if I declare it was the fish. Its never come up before, so there's no way for them to know. There's nothing unbelievable about it being the fish. There are literally zero downsides to this plan. Its exactly as if, instead of planning of the wine to be poisoned, I had just planned for "his dinner," in some abstract sense, to be poisoned. I'm not making the player's decision less meaningful, because he didn't pick the wine based on any concern about poison, nor should he. I'm not mitigating the consequences of rash action, because his action wasn't rash. I'm just choosing X instead of Y, where X and Y are equally believable, and there's no reason to go with X just because it popped into my mind first.[/sblock]
Merchant, as DM: "Ok, ok! I'll tell you what you want to know... please, take a seat. In a chair. There's... there's no reason we have to be barbarians. Just keep the wine, please, its yours. Consider it a gift from your good friend. Lets... lets come to an arrangement, shall we? Over dinner?"

PC: I take a seat next to him, dropping myself loudly into the chair with casual disregard for the damage my armor and weapons are doing to his furniture. "Talk."

DM: He calls his servant, and tells her to bring you food, the finest in the house. With sweat on his brow and a visibly shaking hand, he carefully brings a fork to his mouth and takes a bite of his fish dinner. You can tell that it tastes like sand to him, terrified as he is. He swallows, slowly, audibly, and begins to tell you the truth behind his dealings.

...

DM, later: As he has been speaking, you've noticed a bluish tinge growing on his face. You chalk it up to the stress, until he gasps and clutches his chest. "The... fish...!" he croaks out, and then falls face first into his plate, dead. You realize suddenly that you were never served the dinner he had ordered for you. In fact, you haven't seen his servant at all since he sent her to the kitchen.

PC: Murder! I tear through the apartment in search of the assassin!

 

[Raven Crowking]

The DM should have left it as the wine.

The PC would make his save, or not. Either way, the merchant then knows his wine was poisoned by his supposed allies, and can possibly tell the remaining PCs everything he knows.

Only if the DM thinks it is somehow "wrong" for the PCs to (1) accidently drink poison (see Hamlet!) or (2) find out the plot by saving the merchant's life is there really a problem, and neither one IMHO should be a problem. What if the PC had just knocked the wine from the table onto the floor? Would the poison transport to the fish? What if the PC upended the table? Would it transport to an assassin's dart?

Meh.


RC

 

[pawsplay]

When an NPC takes an action, I attempt to remove myself - as much as is possible, given the situation and mechanics used - from the decisions made regarding that action. In an ideal world, an NPC's actions in a given situation would be resolvable as a function of the situation and the NPC's personality and abilities.

That is just not possible. You would not be playing a game, you would be observing it, which would make your role as a player a contradiction in terms. You also cannot simply channel a character, since there is no character to channel before you create it. Even if you are simply reading a novel, your experience of the characters in it depends partly on your perceptions. You cannot observe an NPC without injecting yourself into their decision-making process. You cannot observe any human being in real life without injecting yourself into their decision-making process. There is no outside observer, that is a fiction of objectivity which simply cannot occur.

If you really want to remove yourself from a character's actions, try this. Run a game based on Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or whatever, but focus on the action of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, exactly as they would behave if they were real. The entirety of human existence is a blink in the eye from the standpoint of our Sun.

While ideally, it would be nice if characters were sufficiently life-like in depiction to have their own agenda, it would me a mistake to forget they were created with a purpose in mind and that their existence is always subject to review. The in-world rationale is bogus, since there is nothing that logically prevents me from saying, in the middle of a heretofore realistic GURPS WWII game, that the Nazi officer they have just encountered is a vampire. Whether that is a sensible action or not depends entirely on what my players would think of that event.

 

[Imaro]

Agreed, with some minor quibbles about the meaning of "neutral." You could be "neutral" in the sense of "not based on the state of the PCs" while still being completely gamist or completely detached from the internal consistency of your setting. But that's probably neither here nor there, we probably all agree that setting up an encounter where reinforcements hear the noise of battle and join in is a reasonable thing for a DM to do.

And you can be neutral in relation to the PC's state, and base your decisions on the consistency and logic of your setting... This isn't really relative to the overall point.

I agree with the second sentence. With the first I have some disagreement. While there may be logic to your decision, there is also a degree of arbitrariness. Unless the orcs are genuinely necessary (in the philosophical sense of the term[that's a great band name, "Necessary Orcs"]) to the logic and realism of your setting, then you still picked arbitrarily amongst the many reasonable possibilities that would all have matched the logic and consistency of the setting. Most likely, within the set of "things that would be logical and consistent," the orcs are just one element. You chose them instead of a different one for reasons that were your own.

Ok, granted this was a purposefully limited example, because I am not and cannot detail an entire campaign setting here. If I placed the orcs there because orcs and ogres have alliances and work together then the decision is based upon the internal logic and consistency of my setting. Now there may be orcs and ogres who work independently but my decision is still based in the assumptions of my setting and not on the state of my PC's.

...disagreed. You can't say, "its neutral that it takes them N rounds to get there because they are X meters from the room" because you are the one who put them X meters from the room, knowing full well that they would then take N rounds to arrive. You could have put them Y or Z meters from the room, deleted the room, put them in the same room with the original orcs, put the room on the moon, whatever, and when you did, you would have known the in-game effects that were likely when you decided.

Of course your decision of X instead of Y or Z was probably perfectly reasonable. Just don't try to make it out to not be your decision. Adding one step of reasoning between your decision and the outcome doesn't negate the fact that your decision was the cause of the outcome.

Oh? Not impartial, I'll give you that. Logical or consistent? You might be perfectly logical or consistent. I'll get to why in a moment.

Disagreed. There are no such thing as orcs. They have no objective distance away, nor any other objective characteristics.

First impartial =/= "not my decision" (that's why we have referees in sports). If I am creating the situation independent of the state of the PC's it is an impartial situation... if I change the situation based on the state (not actions of the PC's) then it is not impartial (though I can make it look so with illusionism).

Second, in a sandbox campaign, how do I " known the in-game effects that were likely when you decided.". you see in a sandbox campaign my PC's could run into this situation anywhere from level 1 up to level 20 and with the variables of feats, class abilities, spells, magic items, etc. thrown in, exactly how do Iknow what thein game effect will be once my PC's interact with it?

So their is no objective stat block for an Orc, I got one in my C&C book and one in my 3.5 MM. Isn't this an objective representation of what an Orc is? If I put it in a situation with no consideration of the state of my PC's then isn't that situation objectively impartial as it pertains to my players?

Now if I change the above or make decisions bsed on the state as opposed to the actions of my PC's... that is wherw impartiallity and illusionism enter the equation.

What there is, on the other hand, is a guy named Imaro. And this Imaro guy had the intention of doing something in a D&D game. And now maybe he's not going to, because he thinks that it might suck for everyone at the table if he does. So instead, he does a different, equally logical, equally consistent thing, that he's chosen because he thinks it will be more fun.

Now he might be boxed in. Maybe he's previously communicated every last relevant detail of the orcs to the players, and changing it now will ruin their suspension of disbelief. But if that's not the case, he's free to change his mind at any time. How could he not be?

I don't think anyone's arguing a DM can't change things... What is being argued is that there are some who enjoy playstyles that do not involve the DM changing things as you describe above (one reasonis that it assumes the DM will always know what route produces more "fun!" and he's not infallible), and it is not badwrongfun or impossible to play in such a style and still have fun.

Changing your mind about your unexpressed future intentions as a DM isn't changing the game world. Its just changing your mind. Its ok to do that.

No, sometimes it is changing the gameworld, just like fudging rolls is changing the gameworld and it's assumptions... but that's ok if you enjoy playing like that. However you have no right to tellothers their style isn't fun for them or isn't possible because you don't enjoy it.

For the record, since I know this is going to come up:

1. If there are zero reasonable alternatives to the originally intended orcs showing up as originally planned, then that may be all you can do. But there are probably other reasonable possibilities that will be exactly as logical and coherent as the original plan.
2. My suggestion that the DM opt for a different, also reasonable alternative is premised on the assumption that there is an actual problem with the orcs being used as originally planned. So don't tell me, "oh, the PCs can just retreat, why change the world so they don't have to?" That's fine! Apparently there was no problem in the first place.
3. Some people are going to say that changing your mind about the nature of the orc reinforcements deprives of the PCs of meaningful choice. That really, really doesn't apply unless the PCs already knew of the nature of the orc reinforcements.
4. This isn't about protecting the PCs from bad decisions. At no point did Imaro bring up whether it was reasonable or not for the PCs to be fighting the ogre and making noise, so I didn't address it. Obviously unwise decisions should have consequences (at least usually, some unwise decisions in real life don't have consequences, so making every unwise in-game decision have consequences can actually wreck the believability of your game world by emphasizing the presence of a punitive dm/god). Of course, that doesn't mean that unwise decisions should have lethal consequences every single time, and my argument about "within the larger set of reasonable outcomes, why not pick one that's fun?" applies here as well.

The only one I'm going to comment on is 4...

How, unless your DM is psychic, can one person decide what's fun and what isn't. I say let your players decide through their actions. It's like riding a bike, they'll fall and they'll hurt themselves but eventually they will be shapping their own fun through their actions without me having to run interference.

 

[Imaro]

The DM should have left it as the wine.

The PC would make his save, or not. Either way, the merchant then knows his wine was poisoned by his supposed allies, and can possibly tell the remaining PCs everything he knows.

Only if the DM thinks it is somehow "wrong" for the PCs to (1) accidently drink poison (see Hamlet!) or (2) find out the plot by saving the merchant's life is there really a problem, and neither one IMHO should be a problem. What if the PC had just knocked the wine from the table onto the floor? Would the poison transport to the fish? What if the PC upended the table? Would it transport to an assassin's dart?

Meh.


RC

Basically this, and guess what... I also think his playerss would have become more cautious and conscious of the dangers of these types of things (poison) in future game sesions. So now, instead of brute force they will probably think a little more about things like this, since there are still dangers they may overlook.

 

[Mallus]

Yes but your assumptions about what facilitates playing a game is quite limited to what you like

My main assumption was that most players don't like being put in no-win situations through no fault of their own (obviously a radical position, natch). I think most the assumptions you're ascribing to me are being manufactured in your head.

...yet again gamers and games are a diverse lot.

Agreed .

= anecdotal evidence

Sentences that begin 'In my experience' usually relate anecdotes, yes. You were perhaps expecting a peer-reviewed study?.

Perhaps it is the way your are stating your thoughts.

Or it's the way you're misreading them. At no point was I criticizing styles of play different from my own. What I did do was note similarities between my current preferred style and others, opine that 'internal setting logic' frequently bears a close resemblance to 'DM Fiat' (for a specific value of DM), and objectivity is hard.

How you got to me being a proponent of WrongBadFun from that remains a mystery of induction.

 

[The Shaman]

I expect people to sulk when they get killed off unfairly.

Sulking is right out with me. It’s just a game, after all.

I guess, but in that scenario, if the GM didn't put the overwhelming ship in combat with you, you wouldn't need the luck. Instead it would have been a fair test of your combat ability that might have ended up with your death, but would actually require luck going badly for that to happen.

You and I have different ideas of what’s “fair.”

I believe that if the rules of the game are applied impartially by all the participants, then the game is fair. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Creating an encounter within CR±2 of our party level doesn’t enter into it unless the rules state that encounters must fall within this range, without exception.

Let’s take one more quick look at the privateer encounter above. Please note that this is an absurdly contrived example offered for the purposes of discussion; the likelihood of players jumping their starship into a system without knowing at least the potential for warfare exists are pretty low in my games, even given Traveller’s communications lag between star systems. In my games this would more properly termed a ‘commerce raider’ encounter; privateers make their money off the prizes take, so they are not prone to indiscriminate destruction any more than pirates are.

Using the random starship encounter tables in my Traveller campaign, the chance of generating an encounter with a commerce raider in a war zone and getting the lowest possible reaction score is one-in-46,656. If the war zone is the result of a random event, which is pretty likely in my campaign, then the chance is another order of magnitude smaller still. (Per my encounter tables, the ship type of the raider varies quite a bit, but that’s a whole ‘nother level of detail not necessary for this discussion.)

With that in mind, if the rules of the game we are playing generate this encounter, then I consider it fair, from either side of the screen, even if the chances of escape or survival for the player characters are miniscule.

In all the games I've played in there has been an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) agreement between the players and the DM that both of them want the same things out of the game. The most important one is that the game keeps going and doesn't result in the pointless deaths of all the PCs.

In my experience the game doesn’t end with the deaths of the player characters. The players generate new characters, and the game continues.

The idea of “pointless deaths” bugs me, to be honest. It presumes there is a “point” to the game, a desired end-state, a foregone conclusion accepted by all at the start of play. In the games I run, I ask the players to develop goals for their characters as we play, but at no time is the adventurers’ successful achievement of these goals presumed. Again, skill and luck alone determine a character’s fate in the games I run, and in the games in which I enjoy playing.

Everything that happens in the game happens because the DM wants it to happen. We understand that the DM has the power to overrule any random tables he's rolling on, the ability to fudge dice, and so on.

Some referees don’t like to overrule the dice.

When I’m behind the screen I consider myself to be a player at the table as well, in that I’m bound by the rules of the game, too. For me to just start making stuff up that should, per the rules of the game, be decided by die roll, isn’t “fair” to me. It’s also why I don’t like to play with referees who fudge. Let’s all play the same game together.

Beyond that, he has the ability to decide what items go on that random table and whether or not he rolls on it at all.

This is an excellent point, one that I think is overlooked by referees with a tendency to fudge the dice when an encounter is moving away from the ‘desired outcome’ the referee has pre-selected.

Simple rule of thumb: if you don’t want the player characters to die, don’t present them with encounters in which they can be killed.

Given these powers, if we end up in a combat with very few to no options that is going to result in our guaranteed death, we can only assume that the DM wanted us to die.

And this I can’t agree with at all.

Once more to the privateer encounter. In the example, the player characters are operating an unarmed free trader when they encounter the 800 dton raider-cruiser. Here’s the problem I have with your argument: the same encounter would occur is the player characters arrived in system crewing a 2000 displacement ton freighter with twelve triple turrets of flaming death, an armed pinnace, a pair of fighters ready to deploy from a makeshift hanger in the hold, and a section of mercenaries aboard as security troops.

If my goal was to kill the player characters, then the raider would suddenly become a 20,000 dton destroyer instead. But it doesn’t. The rules under which we are playing the game turned out a raider which is in fact outmatched by the freighter crewed by the adventurers. That raider could in fact still destroy the player character’s ship – remember that patrol cruiser example – but now the edge lies with the players and their characters. This is what it means to run an impartial game.

The point of a sandbox game isn’t to kill the player characters; it isn’t even to make them more likely to die. It’s to provide the players with a sense, to the extent practicable, that the game-world functions by its own natural laws, its own social forces, independent of their characters. In my experience, random generators are a useful tool in achieving this goal.

 

[The Shaman]

Adventure is an end in itself! When there's a shortage of trouble, swordsmen and sorcerers make some.

And more often than not, trouble leads them to an early grave. Then we pick up dice, paper, and pencil ... roll up a new persona ... and come back swinging into the game that has no end, no final defeat.

I'll have what Ariosto's having.

In fact, make mine a double.

 

[The Shaman]

Is "finding" treasure such an enamored trope in gaming that we can't move away from it. Does it prohibit players and GMs from making more realistic game worlds?

It is an enamored trope because of the source literature, but it's certainly not the only way adventurers can, or have, received items of value.