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Quertus
2020-12-09, 03:40 PM
This thread spawned from a discussion about a clueless abduction in a Cthulhu-tech module in my "worst module ever" thread. I'm having a hard time with the title - suggestions welcome.

So, suppose, rather than using dry HP damage and heal checks, the GM describes the injury, and how the PCs use a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.

Or suppose that encountering some terrifying event leads to PCs developing psychological flaws.

But what if, unlike the GM, the player knows enough about medicine to know that a tourniquet would be the wrong answer? Or enough about psychology to know that the given combination of personality type / trigger / insanity don't go together?

Worse, what if the GM is making this a *player skill* puzzle, expecting the PCs to suggest applying a tourniquet, or realize that this trauma victim has this insanity, but the players are "too smart to fall for that", and therefore (from the GM's perspective) drop the ball?

How does one handle a serious mismatch of real-world knowledge / experience at the gaming table?

False God
2020-12-09, 03:53 PM
I typically tell my players to lighten the heck up.

In my current game, the table spends FAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRR too much times overthinking things, in part because of IRL knowledge, in part because of setting knowledge. (we're playing FFG Star Wars)

EX: I instituted training rules X amount of time for X amount of XP spend, but later provided them a Yadda-Yadda Device that allows them to "train up" in a game-like simulation that takes a fraction of the time (they had to go on a big old quest, and this was basically the reward). They refuse to use it because of worrying about characters aging up mentally and then not adapting well to going back to their IRL selves. They knew this was the reward and set out on the quest to retrieve it and now refuse to use it.

And I'm just like... WAT. Never in this game have I suggested that such would be the case, or really that there were any drawbacks at all. This was their well-earned price for a hard mission.

They spend hours making up problems in their heads and then even more time agonizing over how to resolve their make-believe problems. All the while completely missing out on the game right in front of them.

BRC
2020-12-09, 04:12 PM
My central thought comes down to this

Games should be a test of a player's ingenuity, and a character's skill.

This means a few things

1) All important tests should be resolved through the mechanics of the game. This is key. If the game has mechanics for treating a wound, you should use THOSE, rather than asking the players to say the right words.

Similarly, a player can't automatically succeed on something just by walking through their characters actions step-by-step. You can't build a cotton gin in a bronze-age setting, even if you could describe a perfect step-by-step process for building a functional cotton gin using bronze age tools and materials.

2) The GM controls the shared narrative, and narratives don't neccessarily make sense.

The ultimate truth of the game's reality exists within the GM's mind, and no world, real or fictional, is perfectly rational and deterministic.
You mention the example of a traumatic event causing certain behavior, and the Players knowing that doesn't match up in reality, so not making the connection.

Well, that's what tests in-game are for. For aligning the Player's understanding of the shared reality with that of the GM. A lot of "RPG horror stories" I see come down to a disconnect between the players and the GM's understanding of a scene, whether it's based in real-world expertise, or just different understandings of what a word means, part of the GM's job is to make sure their understanding of a scene and the player's understanding of the same scene line up.


Which is to say, even if, in reality somebody who experienced trauma X wouldn't be displaying Symptoms Y, in this instance, in this game, they are, and there should be some sort of in-game mechanism for the characters to realize that, and pass it along to the players.


Part of the GM's job is to parse a player's specific actions down to something that can be resolved via game mechanics, which can mean that even if the specific actions they're taking don't match up, the scene can move forwards.

The PC's say "I would like to bandage and clean the wound", when the GM was expecting them to talk about applying a tourniquet. Whichever approach is right, it's the GM's job to say "Okay, you're treating the wound, make a medicine check", because the medicine check is what determines that the character knows how to treat this kind of wound, not the exact words the player said.

The best thing to do, if the player's words and the GM's reality don't quite align, is to either alter the reality, or alter the actions.
The DM expects to hear "Torniquet", the Player says "Clean and bandage the wound". The Character succeeds, this can mean one of two things
1) The wound IS of the sort that should be treated by cleaning and bandaging. Part of the check was seeing if reality aligned with the player's chosen approach.
Or
2) The Character recognizes that the proper treatment is a tourinquet, and does that. Even though the player said "Clean and Bandage".


There's plenty of room for creativity and strategic thinking in games, but I try to avoid what I think of as "Narrative Paperwork", handing out bonuses or penalties because the player took the breath to describe the details of their exact actions. The game has mechanics for hitting somebody with a sword, and it's assumed that your character is using all their skill to swordfight. You don't get bonus points because you've described the proper grip to use in this scenario. If your character knows the proper grip, it can be assumed that they'll use it whether or not you explicitly say it.

MoiMagnus
2020-12-09, 04:20 PM
With my table, the solution is usually to be upfront with "it's movie science", "it's anime science", "it's boardgame logic" or anything like that.

Tentative to go with realistic and immersive approach will end up way too much in "hum, actually, that's not how it would work", while everybody (at least at my table) understand the concept of "don't apply real world logic, anything vaguely plausible can work if the skill check succeed".

The only problem is that you can't do "puzzles" as in "there is a logical solution that you have to find", because the players will inevitably prove that the intended solution is absurd and not logical at all.
But you can totally do "puzzles" as in "here is a problem, and come up with a plausible solution to it", so that's not really a problem.

Saint-Just
2020-12-09, 04:21 PM
So, suppose, rather than using dry HP damage and heal checks, the GM describes the injury, and how the PCs use a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.

Or suppose that encountering some terrifying event leads to PCs developing psychological flaws.

But what if, unlike the GM, the player knows enough about medicine to know that a tourniquet would be the wrong answer? Or enough about psychology to know that the given combination of personality type / trigger / insanity don't go together?

Worse, what if the GM is making this a *player skill* puzzle, expecting the PCs to suggest applying a tourniquet, or realize that this trauma victim has this insanity, but the players are "too smart to fall for that", and therefore (from the GM's perspective) drop the ball?


If the GM describes what happens I'd expect players to roll with it when it happens. Applying tourniquet, or putting a pad over the wound, or tamponading it - whatever, PC have the skill (or the game over-generously assumes that everyone can do it), they get the effect. Ideally GM will be willing to listen to the knowledgeable player afterwards, but it is not that crucial. We already have a feckton of books where people use ingested sugar as an antidote for cyanide poisoning, or suck out the snake venom, etc., and sometimes those tropes are preserved despite public understanding that this is not realistic (Sandstorm for D&D 3.5 spends time talking about how you cannot drown in the quicksand... and then immediately after introduces a hypothetical non-magical form of sand in which you can drown).

Psychological effects are only different because they are a lasting effect on the character. If it is a crunch-heavy effect in a crunch-heavy game (like taint in Oriental Adventures or Heroes of Horror) I'd think that everyone should have expected that. It is a problem if it's mostly for RP and if it is affecting the player of PC in question is uncomfortable/cannot belive that PC would behave in that way. If it is a PC of another player (who is ok with that) or an NPC, there is no problem.
(I am also not sure that even professional psychologist can say "that person would not go insane in that way", because there is usually not much information available to the players, so making assessment is difficult and that is ignoring all possible confounding factors like non-human races, existence of magic, entirely different society etc. etc.)

Now if it is a puzzle then there is a big huge problem. Being knowledgeable is not supposed to hinder you. If GM knows the player and his area of expertise well then they may accept the player's judgement. But if the player is right but not obviously right... player's suspension of disbelief is shattered no matter what. They may try to argue with the GM or they may just look on the problem (and possibly many others in the future) not as a "real" problem but as a "put an A in the slot B" puzzle divorced from all actual meaning. I have no good ideas what to do in that case, except "don't make mistakes in your puzzles".

NichG
2020-12-09, 04:57 PM
Abstraction and awareness of the limits of your knowledge are your friends here. Take life experiences or training or other such things that you have and your players largely don't as ways to inject moments that feel more real. But if you don't know details its better to be vague and elicit details from the person at the table who does know more.

E.g. 'blood is seeping from the deep gouges in your arm and you can see through to bone. What do you do?'

There's a separate problem when genre conventions or demands of a system are just silly when the game is trying to be serious. You can't salvage Call of Cthulhu's "You see something alien, now you have ADHD" problem. In that case, you have to run things differently to keep them serious.

zarionofarabel
2020-12-09, 06:09 PM
I throw dice at the naysayers until the shut up and play the game!!!

Duff
2020-12-09, 06:44 PM
Communication is key. Before a GM does this sort of stuff you need to know your players enough to know the area's where they're way ahead of you.
Don't do that stuff on their turf unless you've deliberately done the research and are giving them a moment of glory.
You want to give your player who's an actual IRL ER doctor a chance to show off. And they have a character who knows that stuff. Throw them a description of the injury using the actual terms. Maybe have a checklist of things which they need to do to stabalise the patient. If they miss something, describe what happens.

General rule for GMs "Don't have a The Correct Answer". Have an answer (or don't if you're comfortable with them failing), but always be open to other solutions.
If they say "I stop the bleeding" the answer can be "roll for it" or "How?" If you're fishing for "Tourniquet" (You're almost certainly wrong in RL first aid terms, but anyway...) and they give "I use a bandage" you either accept that or you say "It doesn't seem tight enough" and accept that when they say they make it tighter they're close enough.

Also. you need to allow for the possibility of players assuming their answer covers the sensible things.. I once had a character fighting a fishman thing. I would have given a big advantage if the player had said they were stabbing up into the gap between the scales (or any words to that effect). They didn't. but in talking to the player afterward, they'd assumed that was what they were doing

aglondier
2020-12-10, 06:51 AM
A well oiled team of players can seriously blow away a gm who was not expecting it. During a Shadowrun game a while ago, the players starting a new campaign used teamwork, strategy and tactics to blitz opponents well outside their weight class, leaving the gm scrabbling to present realistic threats.
There will almost always be someone at the table with better real world knowledge than you as a gm. I, myself, have a homemade working 1/4 scale trebuchet in my back yard. I may know a bit about siege weapons and warfare.
Roll with it. Use it to your advantage if you can. If the player is being unreasonable, go RAW from the rulebooks, bugger reality, it's a game.

Martin Greywolf
2020-12-10, 07:09 AM
Honestly? Most people who bring in IRL knowledge in like this don't have that much of it in the first place and just want to flex on the "uneducated" folks.

I mean, have I studied half a dozen of swordsmanship manuals, sometimes in original latin? Yes. Do I know what is and is not a good idea in a sword fight, since I was in several sword fights? Also yes. Do I still want to use my spear as a jumping pole just to dropkick an orc off of a cliff? Hell yes.

There is time and place for "this is how things actually work", but that ime and place is after the game is done, during a feedback session, not during play to grind the session to a halt.

As for relying on player knowledge, that is another topic entirely, and should probably be avoided, unless you know your players really well.

Spiderswims
2020-12-11, 10:48 PM
Keep everything simple.

Don't try to describe accurate medical injuries or conditions, unless you are a doctor or something . So the same way you don't want healing much more then treating wounds.

Really, it's not worth the massive waste of time when you describe something, then a player will take an issue with it and you can end up in an endless round of talking spin, or worse.


Or you can just keep things supernatural or magical. A magic blood wound is whatever you as the GM says it is, and the "doctor' player can't say anything about it.

Vahnavoi
2020-12-12, 04:20 AM
If you're setting up a training simulation, you need to do your homework. This includes asking the expert player for help when designing the thing.

To get in the situation you describe, you need to not know your stuff, and also not know your player knows their stuff. There are two ways this can go smoothly:

1) the expert player makes their case briefly and in a way you understand: you realize your mistake, fix it and let the superior solution be applied.

2) If the case can't be made briefly, the expert player lets it slide and then gives you feedback after the game so you can fix the error in future games.

It is no different, really, than a rules dispute between an inexperienced GM and an experienced player.

Now, a lot of players, experts included, don't expect high degree of realism. This is especially true if you're NOT doing a training simulation, but instead are emulating genre fiction. Even experts often let erroneous portrayals slide, because they're used to fiction getting them wrong. Being "too smart to fall for it" is rarely caused by real world expertise, and more often caused by not treating the fiction on the fiction's terms. I see it happen more often because people are confused about the genre (f. ex. survival horror versus cosmic horror) or structure (linear versus open) of a game.

Satinavian
2020-12-12, 04:25 AM
I prefer systems with a proprt skill system, not some halfhearted thing like D&D and thus can just use a skill roll to determine character ability.


So the problem is not "do the players know to do it" because that does not influence the outcome. What remains is "Do players and GM agree about what actually is possible to do". That can only be solved by OT discussion greater expertise is convincing.

Vahnavoi
2020-12-12, 05:09 AM
Also, to put some things into perspective:

Modern tabletop RPGs owe a lot to wargames, and wargames owe a lot to Kriegsspiel. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel)

Kriegsspiel basically codified the idea of a game master (called umpire in the article) . A word needs to be said about the role of the game master: Kriegsspiel had several versions, some with heavier mechanistic rules and others with lighter rules with more control given to the game master. The rationale for doing away with some of the more obscure rules in favor of on-the-spot rulings by a game master was something that ought to be immediately recognizable: the heavier versions were slow and deemed to take too much time compared to thing they were trying to model.

However, this increased importance of a game master came with a cave-at: to keep the game grounded in reality, the game master ought to be a superior officer with field experience. This obviously wasn't a position for non-experts.

As wargames spread outside the military and started to be played as a fun past-time instead of a serious training tool, the thought was somewhat lost along the line. Come D&D and especially AD&D, Gary Gygax, in the books, outright says the game is not meant to simulate anything outside itself and that as a model of reality, it can only be considered a failure. Furthermore, Gygax also noted that creating and running an entire fictional world to high degree of realism is not possible for most individuals. Realism ought to be attempted only where it improves the game and no-one should aim for the impossible.

Still, it's still clearly laid out in AD&D books that ideally, the game master (called dungeon master since it's D&D) ought to know the rules and the setting best out of everyone at their table, including willingness to look at real history and culture to keep a game relatable. So a game master should have some expertise at least relative to their players. If they don't, it raises the question of what are they doing in that position? It's one thing if experienced players are teaching an inexperienced person how to run a game, but beyond that, the dynamic where one person has an authoritative position over the game requires some backing for that authority. I'd argue one reason why inexperienced game masters sometimes cope poorly with more experienced or knowledgeable players, is because it reminds them their authority is only nominal and they can only do their job with player good faith.

But, to tie this together: if you want to make puzzles or run games based on detailed real world knowledge, you are then playing by Kriegsspiel rules: if you don't have brass on your collar, you are not qualified. You cannot make good puzzles reliant on skills you don't actually have. Stick to what you know, which in the case of hobby gaming mostly means abstracted game rules.

Zombimode
2020-12-12, 06:07 AM
I typically tell my players to lighten the heck up.

In my current game, the table spends FAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRR too much times overthinking things, in part because of IRL knowledge, in part because of setting knowledge. (we're playing FFG Star Wars)

EX: I instituted training rules X amount of time for X amount of XP spend, but later provided them a Yadda-Yadda Device that allows them to "train up" in a game-like simulation that takes a fraction of the time (they had to go on a big old quest, and this was basically the reward). They refuse to use it because of worrying about characters aging up mentally and then not adapting well to going back to their IRL selves. They knew this was the reward and set out on the quest to retrieve it and now refuse to use it.

And I'm just like... WAT. Never in this game have I suggested that such would be the case, or really that there were any drawbacks at all. This was their well-earned price for a hard mission.

They spend hours making up problems in their heads and then even more time agonizing over how to resolve their make-believe problems. All the while completely missing out on the game right in front of them.

Uhm... you should take this seriously instead of brushing it aside as "they are overthinking this". They know it's a reward but they don't want it. Maybe because it feels like cheating and they don't like that. They are not overthinking this, they make up rationalizations for why they won't use this cheating device.

False God
2020-12-12, 01:46 PM
Uhm... you should take this seriously instead of brushing it aside as "they are overthinking this". They know it's a reward but they don't want it. Maybe because it feels like cheating and they don't like that. They are not overthinking this, they make up rationalizations for why they won't use this cheating device.

If they didn't want it to begin with they didn't have to undertake the quest, there's always plenty to do. It quite literally was the reward for the quest, there was no real purpose to the quest aside from this. "Travel to the ancient temple, search the ruins, recover the lost artifact that does Yadda-Yadda."

And I'm not making them use it. Time is a factor in the game. They're free to make use of their time however they please. The universe won't stop because they took a week off.

But they fret over not having enough in-game time to accomplish the things they want to AND train. They completed the quest to achieve a means to do both, but refuse to use it and continue to fret over the time issue.

Their petulance is the only thing I don't take seriously. I'm not going to lift the training time restrictions, and I'm not going to pause the universe for them. If they spent more time working to resolve any situation instead of fretting over how they can accomplish everything they'd probably make a lot more progress and find themselves worrying a lot less as downtime occurs naturally between quests. Especially as in Star Wars you've got hyper-space travel times that can extend for days.

Quertus
2020-12-12, 08:42 PM
If they didn't want it to begin with they didn't have to undertake the quest, there's always plenty to do. It quite literally was the reward for the quest, there was no real purpose to the quest aside from this. "Travel to the ancient temple, search the ruins, recover the lost artifact that does Yadda-Yadda."

And I'm not making them use it. Time is a factor in the game. They're free to make use of their time however they please. The universe won't stop because they took a week off.

But they fret over not having enough in-game time to accomplish the things they want to AND train. They completed the quest to achieve a means to do both, but refuse to use it and continue to fret over the time issue.

Their petulance is the only thing I don't take seriously. I'm not going to lift the training time restrictions, and I'm not going to pause the universe for them. If they spent more time working to resolve any situation instead of fretting over how they can accomplish everything they'd probably make a lot more progress and find themselves worrying a lot less as downtime occurs naturally between quests. Especially as in Star Wars you've got hyper-space travel times that can extend for days.

Let them actually solve *this* particular problem.

If they have a tech character, let them figure out how the device works, and let them build one that *doesn't* have that issue (never mind that *this one* (supposedly) didn't have this issue, either). Problem solved!

Then maybe they'll feel up to actually solving other problems, too. Problem solved!

Grod_The_Giant
2020-12-12, 09:01 PM
Player: I got a 19 on my first aid check.
GM: Okay, you tear a strip of fabric off his shirt and use it to make a tourniquet. He's stable now, what's next?
Player: Actually, for an injury like you described a tourniquet would make things worse. A pressure bandage would be better.
GM: Good to know. You do that instead, then. What next?

If the player describes their actions in scientifically accurate detail, I'll treat it the same way as I would as someone who painted a really vivid image or dramatically tied in roleplaying elements-- an appropriate bonus on the check and/or a metagame reward like a hero point.

False God
2020-12-14, 09:58 PM
Let them actually solve *this* particular problem.

If they have a tech character, let them figure out how the device works, and let them build one that *doesn't* have that issue (never mind that *this one* (supposedly) didn't have this issue, either). Problem solved!

Then maybe they'll feel up to actually solving other problems, too. Problem solved!

They "solved" the issue last weekend and dumped it.

Quertus
2020-12-15, 10:55 AM
I *still* haven't been able to really process the diverse responses that the thread has drawn :smallredface:


They "solved" the issue last weekend and dumped it.

… perhaps an OOC conversation is in order? Perhaps this is their way of attempting to communicate that they would like you to create a less time-sensitive campaign? Or perhaps the opposite - that they are enjoying the juggling too much to want it to end? Or maybe they're just "playing their characters", while you're "playing the game"?