You're doing what? Surprising the DM

[Nagol]

Why? There is absolutely nothing inherent in D&D which requires or even implies exploratory play. Even going back to 1e, you can look at things like Dragonlance and see that exploratory play can take a pretty far back seat thirty years ago.

It doesn't have to and there's nothing wrong with exploratory play. But, the presumption that D&D=exploratory play isn't something I take for granted.

<snip>

Because entire systems are dedicated to it and no systems are in place to negate it. Depending on the version we are looking at, there are sub-systems for exploratory play in PC-NPC interaction (reaction rolls, hiring henchmen, findng appropriatey skilled NPCs), base expectations regarding how the setting will be engaged (mapping, traps, random monster encounters, hex clearing, random design and treasure placement, xp awards), and the basic premise (enter this hole; find the wealth; escape) as established in the examples of play, published works like modules, and designer notes.

 

[Celebrim]

And, had the DM skipped over your play and ignored your cues, he would be a bad DM right? Or at least, not a good DM for you. Would that be fair to say Celebrim?

No. It isn't. First of all, I am not you. We not only don't have the same agendas but our agendas are also not opposites, reverses, inverses, or in any way related to each other. You can't reverse your expectations and come up with what I'm thinking or feelings. I'm not your mirror. I am not you. You haven't been remotely fair to my position in this whole thread, so don't ask me to bless your description of me as fair. Heck, you are still beating on the drum that my DM agenda is crushing player 'creativity'. I can't even address the unfairness of your claims anymore. All I can say is that I am not you.

To begin with, I'm making my own play in that scene independent of a need for the DM to provide me anything. I'm perfectly content to self-express and fellowship in that scene, as is indicated by my own character establishing scene using my character advocacy. Afterwards we did some intraparty RP, ending with me exchanging a spell with another wizard in the party. By focusing on what my player does rather than outcome, I free myself from the need for a particular DM response. However the DM chooses to take up this offering, I'm happy to find play where I am.

Secondly, since I have a flexible agenda, if the DM responds by offering up different responses - say an encounter with a brown dragon or the discovery of a half buried pyramid (both of which happened) - I'm ok with that. Here is something new to do and something new to play with. If the DM can't think of anything and we arrive at our destination (a city, where we believe a relative of one of the PC's has been taken after having been captured by pirates and sold into slavery) and the quest continues in earnest, then I'm happy with that too. And if we arrive in the city and learn that the relative is no longer here, but has been taken elsewhere, then I'm happy with that too. I'm not invested in the desert, but I'm also not unwilling to become invested in the desert in the same way that I was also willing to become invested in something that is partly or mostly about another player's agenda.

If after a few sessions I found the DM boring or the groups agenda too narrow or too different from my own, and if my tentative overtures to create new agendas and play that interested me more were ignored or rebuffed (politely or not), I'd politely bow out. My intention is to create IC drama, not OOC drama.

So, why isn't the reverse true? The DM ignored my cues, forced me to play out a scene I had no interest in playing but, now I'm a bad player.

Why must this be about you being 'a bad player' - something I have never said and which is part of your continuing gross misstatements of anything I've ever said. I believe you made a mistake, one that I mostly find understandable and sympathetic. That doesn't mean I believe you are a mistake. I believe you made one bad play, but that doesn't mean I believe you are a bad player. I have lots of players with specific agendas. There agendas aren't wrong, they just require special handling. I would prefer that all players had broad agendas, but there is nothing wrong with having speciifc focuses. Enjoyment is a very personal experience. Likewise, I've never really sided with your DM either, because as I said, I don't know what he was thinking either. It's quite possible he needs to step up his game to prevent the sort of distrust and disengagement he evidently got frustrated with and failed to handle as well as it could be.

You cannot have it both ways.

I almost never accept that there are only two ways.

 

[Jackinthegreen]

Perhaps making the desert the main goal instead of the city on the other side would be a better way to get the players engaged with the idea of exploring the desert. The desert can't be an implicit goal either, since it runs the risk of the players simply not getting it and then thinking "Going across the desert sucks!" And to be fair, going across a desert usually does suck because it requires a lot of preparations. Getting by in a city usually doesn't because there is assumed to be easily found shelter, food, and water.

I think we’re confusing two possible approaches. There is “exploring the desert” and there is “crossing the desert”. I don’t think the players are setting out to explore the desert. They want to get to the city on the other side. But to get to the city, they need to cross the desert. So what’s the point of having a desert for them to cross if it just gets handwaved? ”Boy you guys are cool, you can cross a desert”? Maybe I want to give the wizard a chance to show off that new Teleport spell, or maybe I want them to use up that favour the Sheik of the Desert owes them, or maybe the very ability to cross the desert using that favour was the reason they encountered the Sheik three levels ago in the first place (ah – now we see why that scene was actually relevant when it seemed just a distraction and a grind at the time!).

Or maybe there is something(s) in the desert for them to encounter which have story relevance. The PC’s certainly don’t know. The players may or may not know, but likely suspect. Most groups I’ve gamed with would look at getting across the desert as one more challenge, and would have some faith that the GM isn’t putting it there for an opportunity to bore and frustrate the players. But then, my group generally trusts to the GM to make the game interesting. If, after some game play, the desert seems all about hunger and thirst checks and random, boring wandering monsters, we’ll probably have a chat, but simply assuming that the GM has designed a dull, boring, monotonous trek through the desert so he can waste three hours of game time for no good purpose begs the question why I would game with that GM in the first place, if that’s the approach I expect.

I can’t know whether the scene holds interest unless I give the scene an opportunity to unfold. If the desert is, in fact, just background scenery, then I would expect “After a bumpy, sweaty three days on centipedeback, you reach the other side of the desert – cue description of city”. But absent the centipede, I’d expect “after a hot and dry week of trekking through the night and sheltering from the hot sun in the day, you reach the other side of the desert – cue description of city”. If the travel has no bearing on the story, it won’t be a focus either way.

Even if the city is the goal, achieving the goal requires crossing the desert. If getting past the choke point of the dungeon requires defeating the Grell, I don’t expect the Grell to just step out of the way – I expect that the players will deal with the Grell. If the city is the goal, then crossing the desert is a challenge that must be met to get to the city. I don’t expect, as a player, to cut either one out.

Perhaps I should have been more clear. If the DM wants the players to even consider the desert as something more than an obstacle to be bypassed or crossed, he should make it interesting enough beforehand that it's likely the players will think of it as a goal unto itself. Expecting significant encounters and story hooks like what Celebrim describes here means that it's probably best for the situation to have a description of some (not all, since there does need to be some mystery after all!) of those before coming to the desert itself. The original situation, however, seems to assume that no such things were known about at all. Considering many people, even experienced RPG players, might not see a desert as rich with opportunity, having clear goals in the city but not at the desert makes the desert much less interesting and thus more likely for the players to resort to bypassing measures instead of exploratory or engaging measures.

And sometimes certain measures can be interpreted wrong, so of course it's important to ask "Are you doing X to put a new spin on the situation, or are you doing it to bypass the situation?" Such a question is probably necessary with the centipede so that the DM isn't surprised and reacts in a totally different way than the player(s) might have expected.

 

[Cybit]

You guys are expounding a thesis on what is probably a very simple point

You should have an open line of communication with your DM/players about this kind of stuff, and not be resorting to passive aggressive BS and attempting to poorly use mechanics to resist having an honest conversation where people *gasp* MIGHT HAVE TO COMPROMISE.

If the DM misses my cues, I might be a little annoyed, but unless I told him specifically and explicitly what I was trying to do, I can't exactly hold him responsible for reading my mind. If I miss a player's cues and find out later, I generally feel terrible and try to pay attention more to everyone's cues.

Sometimes I wonder whether folks actually have fun playing these games or do so in order to have ammunition for their point of view.

 

[pemerton]

D&D also comes with a huge amount of implied exploratory play. Unless the table has deliberately and purposfully excluded such play from the game, the DM is perfectly right to expect exploratory engagement. It's part of the package of the game system.

Because entire systems are dedicated to it and no systems are in place to negate it. Depending on the version we are looking at, there are sub-systems for exploratory play in PC-NPC interaction (reaction rolls, hiring henchmen, findng appropriatey skilled NPCs), base expectations regarding how the setting will be engaged (mapping, traps, random monster encounters, hex clearing, random design and treasure placement, xp awards), and the basic premise (enter this hole; find the wealth; escape) as established in the examples of play, published works like modules, and designer notes.

Hiring henchmen only has detailed exploratory rules in 1st ed AD&D (perhaps 2nd ed too? I'm not as familiar with that edition). Those rules are not part of B/X, nor 3E's Leadership feat, nor 4e.

Reaction rolls aren't particularly about exploration - they can equally be part of a gamist style of play.

Mapping is not called out as part of play in 4e. I'm not sure about 3E or 2nd ed AD&D.

Random monster encounters aren't part of 4e per the core rules.

Hex clearing is not part of Moldvay Basic (it's introduced in Expert), nor 4e, nor (I think) 3E. I'm not sure about 2nd ed.

XP are based on very different systems in different editions. None is terribly exploration focused, though AD&D 1st ed might generate that sort of orientation via its default means of finding treasure.

As far as the basic premise of play, what you describe is not part of the premise of huge chunks of post-Dragonlance play.

In other words, while I agree that there are affinities of certain parts of D&D over the years with exploratory play, I think your list overstates those affinities.

It is harder to try to run scene framing in D&D

Well, quite (at least if you're talking pre-4e). But equally I very commonly read about how Forge games are very narrow while D&D is very broad and generic, etc.

It's an open question whether or not we should use pre-4e D&D to play other than Gygaxian exploratory play, but if (i) the group has decided, for whatever reason (probably habit) to play D&D, and (ii) it becomes clear that a bit of exploration the GM is angling towards is of little or no interest to thte table, then it's not obvious to me that the best way for the GM and the table to proceed is to pursue that exploration.

Well, my approach is to frame scenes and generate complications before the session

OK. That's certainly not what I have in mind when I talk about scene-framing play.

That's probably true, but that's a very different usage of the word 'railroading' than its normal usage.

I'm not sure that "railroading" has a normal usage, although GM force is certainly part of it.

But despite the controversy over the meaning of the word, I at least found Hussar's meaning pretty clear.

If a DM says, "You find a dark and spooky cave", it's only a railroad if you have to go in.

What is interesting is what underpins the "have to". For instance, if all the action is inside the cave, then de facto the players have to have their PCs go in if they want to play the game.

Interestingly, in BW, not only are you expected to go in, but, if you don't have an Instinct like 'I never go into spooky places', arguably the GM has the systems blessing to begin the scene frame with you having already entered a spooky cave

Sure, though I suspect in practice the degree of hardness of scene framing varies quite a bit across playing groups.

BW is fairly clear that the GM is expected to exercise authority in framing scenes. The question is, whose interests is the GM expected to have regard to in exercising that authority? BW, and [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] in his examples, emphasises the preeminence of player interests. The players hook the GM. That is different from (for instance) the default presentation of a post-Gygaxian D&D module, in which the GM hooks the players.

But, if you are playing a Gygaxian dungeon crawling game using a system that supports and blesses that style of play, you probably aren't playing 'a scene-framed game' regardless of what you preferences may be, and you don't have a right to impose a new social contract on the table just because you are frustrated with the continuous framing.

First, as I've indicated above in this post, whether D&D is inherently a Gygaxian dungeon crawling game is hugely up for grabs. As I've noted in other posts in other threads, what sucked me into Moldvay Basic wasn't the Gygaxian element - it was the foreword, which said nothing about dungeon crawling and was all about saving the kingdom from the dragon tyrant using a sword acquired from the myseterious cleric.

As for whether or not Hussar is being rude at his table, were you there? I wasn't. So I won't comment. But there is nothing remotely objectionable in principle, and no evidence that contradicts that as far as the details are concerned, about Hussar not wanting to engage in (what is from the player point of view) unmotivated exploration.

If the game you are playing at has not formerly worked in that way and the system you are playing in does not formally bless that approach to play, then there is no reason at all to assume that the act of summoning a monster is 'best understood' according to a paradigm that isn't a part of the game and may not even be part of GMs tool set.

<snip>

Nor is it clear that Hussar (however clear his own understanding may have been) clearly explained his intention and desire to the DM

I'd never heard of scene-framing as a formal technique until I first visited the Forge in 2004. But the first time I remember having issues with (what retrospectively I would describe as) framing exploratory scenes in which the players were not interested would be around 1984.

At the time I wasn't sure what to do, and just muddled through (though as I've posted in other threads, 1986's Oriental Advetures made a huge difference for me.) I would have loved to have had the Forge advice to draw on back then - it might have saved me having to learn so many things msyelf.

Perhaps I'm an especially perceptive GM, but frankly I find it hard to imagine that Hussar's GM didn't realise that Hussar wasn't interested in the desert, and was summoning the centipede for that reason (eg I would have expected the conversation among the players to make that clear).

 

[pemerton]

I can’t know whether the scene holds interest unless I give the scene an opportunity to unfold.

The point is that there was something in which Hussar knew he was interested - City B - and the GM is putting something in the way.

I don't quite understand what your overall point is, but you seem to be trying to show that it is impossible, or worthless, to play an RPG where the players hook the GM rather than vice versa. Yet I know that to be false, from my own and others' experiences.

If that's not what your overall point is, could you be a bit clearer about what you're trying to show.

So same thing every game. Ho hum another trip out to save the world.

I don't understand how you infer from "All awesome, all the time" to "same thing every game, ho hum". If you've posted actual play reports I've missed them, but here are some links to some actual play reports that I have posted from my own game.

I'm probably not the best person to judge my own game, but I don't think it's especially same-y, and I'll even go so far as to say it's not especially ho-hum.

 

[Celebrim]

What is interesting is what underpins the "have to". For instance, if all the action is inside the cave, then de facto the players have to have their PCs go in if they want to play the game.

Again, read the essay I wrote. Building a world where the only thing engaging is in the cave is by definition a 'Small World'. If you want to avoid a railroad, you can't build a Small World.

BW is fairly clear that the GM is expected to exercise authority in framing scenes. The question is, whose interests is the GM expected to have regard to in exercising that authority?

False choice again. Regardless of system, the GM acts in the interest of the players. The GM exists to entertain the players. Every time I'm getting ready for a session, my underlying motivation is, "What will be fun for the players?" However, the reverse is true. The players exist to entertain the GM as well. There are GM roles and player roles, but everyone is playing the game together. The game involves mutually revolving around each others interests, in as much as the player's know that the GM wants to see their self-expression and is delighted by it and they want to see the GM's creativity and self-expression and are delighted by it. In both D&D and BW, the GM generally frames scenes which could at some level be said to be against the immediate interest of the players and characters. A character with the goal, "Become wealthy and powerful.", could have his goal met in one scene. But in practice, both the GM and player realize that implicitly the goal is "Earn wealth and power." and in fact the player expects the path to his goal to be difficult and is going to enjoy the journey. A player with the goal, "Live out the fantasy of being wealthy and powerful", can have his immediate need met as well, but it isn't necessarily the best for the game because stories that are interesting usually involve conflict. The players want the journey to be hard, just not 'too hard'.

I think the question isn't whose interests are being act in, but rather who gets to make the choice.

That is different from (for instance) the default presentation of a post-Gygaxian D&D module, in which the GM hooks the players.

Seriously, I'd love to see some example formats for modules in which the players hook the DM based off their arbitrarily chosen interests. Aren't modules by definition preparing scene and setting, so doesn't the hook have to come from the author? Is the GM normally the sole owner of the module and protector of its secrets, so where else do you expect hooks to come from?

 

[Celebrim]

The point is that there was something in which Hussar knew he was interested - City B - and the GM is putting something in the way.

Oh, curses. You know, my players have a great interest in treasure and magical items, but gosh darn, lousy GM that I am I keep putting things in their way all the time. I'm sure they could acquire more gold and magic items if I just took all the dang obstacles out of the game.

However, I'm equally sure that if I actually did that they wouldn't be happy for long.

I don't quite understand what your overall point is...

Yes.

, but you seem to be trying to show that it is impossible, or worthless, to play an RPG where the players hook the GM rather than vice versa. Yet I know that to be false, from my own and others' experiences.

Then why the heck assume that that is the point? I know that is possible for the players to hook the GM rather than vica versa. I can cite probably eight major threads that are the result of player's hooking the GM and player agency and/or backstory authority rather than me hooking them.

If you don't get it this deep into the thread, we might as well give it up.

 

[Ratskinner]

First, as I've indicated above in this post, whether D&D is inherently a Gygaxian dungeon crawling game is hugely up for grabs. As I've noted in other posts in other threads, what sucked me into Moldvay Basic wasn't the Gygaxian element - it was the foreword, which said nothing about dungeon crawling and was all about saving the kingdom from the dragon tyrant using a sword acquired from the myseterious cleric.

I would love to hear your impressions of Dungeon World, should you ever get a chance to play it.

I'd never heard of scene-framing as a formal technique until I first visited the Forge in 2004. But the first time I remember having issues with (what retrospectively I would describe as) framing exploratory scenes in which the players were not interested would be around 1984.

The earliest thing I recall that was anything reasonably akin to scene-framing was actually 2e advice on creating "encounters" in the...DMG(?)*. If memory serves: there was a section on more story-oriented campaigns and writing adventures or encounters for them, and included some of the "observational" advice about what got your players excited and looking for hooks. The advice did focus on "What's important about this encounter?" Although its ideas about what constituted "important" probably wouldn't measure well....or maybe they would..curse human memory. Quite possibly there were bits about making sure that every encounter was memorable/meaningful or advanced the plot.

[EDIT]Maybe I can't really recall this....[/EDIT]

*I no longer have my books...there is a possibility it could have been in one of the grey books as well, maybe Creative Campaigning. ::shrug::

 

[pemerton]

Seriously, I'd love to see some example formats for modules in which the players hook the DM based off their arbitrarily chosen interests. Aren't modules by definition preparing scene and setting, so doesn't the hook have to come from the author? Is the GM normally the sole owner of the module and protector of its secrets, so where else do you expect hooks to come from?

The Burning THACO pdf tackles this for adapting classic D&D adventures to BW.

The adventure ideas in the HeroWars narrator's book are nicely set out to try to balance pre-packaging with scene-framed imperatives.