The Delta Theory of Meaningfulness

[icefractal]

The "Why Hexcrawls?" thread got me thinking about this subject, and I decided to write it down to formalize my thoughts and in case it's useful to anyone.
Delta in this case refers to amount of difference, as in - "How differently will things go in the game as a result of this choice?"

For me, that's the main factor in how meaningful / important something feels. Not everything in a game needs maximum delta! For example, a game with a linear plot has very little delta in that area, but that doesn't mean it won't be fun anyway. But it does mean that a scene like "discussion about which route to take, that's IC supposed to be intense and meaningful" isn't going to hit very well for me if I know that we're getting to the same destination in the same condition regardless.

So for IC decisions, delta is obvious - how much actual impact does the decision make? Obviously as players this usually isn't easily measurable, because we don't know how things would have gone in an alternate universe. GM transparency can make delta more apparent - for example, if the GM decides on the full security layout of a heist target before we even start the heist, and commits to not changing it, then we know our decisions within the heist are potentially meaningful. Conversely, if we're playing an Adventure Path and the GM has no intent to significantly rewrite it based on events, then we know there's an upper bound on how much our decisions can matter. Do fake decisions (as in, illusionism, the GM presents a choice but both paths lead to the same place) yield delta? Yes, but it's risky. Because if the players ever discover the deception, they're going to perceive any future delta as fake unless it's so transparent that deception is impossible.

Delta also applies to char-gen decisions, and how much a given decision has depends on how the GM is running the campaign. For example, consider the choice of being a Fire Sorcerer vs an Ice Sorcerer. If the opposition is fixed (due to being a sandbox and/or a fully-made adventure) then this is a pretty meaningful decision. But if the GM is creating the opposition just in advance and adjusting the difficulty to provide a desired level of challenge, then it becomes pretty much a cosmetic choice. Even having a capability vs not having it may or may not be meaningful. For example, being a master hacker vs not seems like a pretty big difference, right? Well - usually. But if the GM just has your hacking yield the same information that (in the absence of a PC hacker) they would have had a contact provide to the PCs anyway, then it's become more of a cosmetic choice.

Delta can also apply to things that aren't choices. For example - how meaningful are levels? In a sandbox game, they're pretty meaningful, because you're facing the same foes (at a given place) either way, so being higher level is going to turn "run away!" into "we can take them" and "we can take them" into "no problem". But if the opposition always scales with the PCs, levels become less meaningful. It can still generate some delta if the style of interaction changes - for example, a 20th level 3.5E party facing CR 20 foes is a fairly different gameplay experience than a 1st level party facing CR 1 foes (although it depends on the foes and the PCs - some classes don't change as much).

IMO, it's better to be honest about how much delta things have. If I know that a choice isn't going to make much difference, then fine, I'll just make a quick decision and move on. But if a choice is present as important, I spend time agonizing over it, and then it turns out to mean very little? That's annoying.

[Atranen]

A good, and imo accurate, summary of an important concept. I like Sid Meier's take on it: "A game is a series of meaningful choices". To the extent RPGs are a game, the players need to be able to make choices and have those choices matter. I also like GMs who telegraph more information for this reason--DCs and the like--because it let's the players make informed choices.

I think one of the biggest divide in RPGs is where those are being made. In D&D, the focus has shifted more to "pre game" choices, i.e. character builds. Your important choices are what fear to take, how to divide your class levels, what spells/maneuvers to select, etc. Story games and the OSR are both responding to this, in different ways, by redirecting the meaningful choices to be primarily in-game. There aren't as much "builds" or optimization discussions, but there's a greater emphasis on choices that affect the narrative.

[NichG]

I guess for me, it has to go a bit further - not just a delta, but an informed delta. Or maybe another way to look at it is, there are lots of different kinds of ways to perceive deltas. Maybe it boils down into three categories: 'you can predict the delta', 'you can retrodict the delta', and 'there's a delta but you can't tell'.

For me, the 'predictive deltas' are the most meaningful, even when the prediction ends up being wrong. It kind of ties to agency - there's a situation, my choice can influence the situation, and I know enough about how my choice might influence the situation to feel like if the situation goes one way or another way it was my responsibility.

The (in-character) 'retrodictive deltas' are kind of okay - you chose to be a fire wizard rather than an ice wizard, and it turns out that the adventure the GM wanted to run has a bunch of ice creatures, so in retrospect clearly your choice did matter - but you couldn't have know how it would have mattered, so its sort of like being lucky or unlucky. But you can't really say 'I was responsible for knowing that there would be ice creatures, so I made a good choice'.

The third category is when, technically, things would have been different - maybe even in very significant ways - but you can't guess anything about it, nor can you even really tell after the fact that it made sense that your choice had this consequence. Like with the fire/ice thing, even if you couldn't plan it in detail, you could know in advance that 'if I play fire and there are ice creatures, good! If I play fire and there are fire creatures, bad!'. But if its a blind intersection where you go left vs right, and the only way you know that it would have mattered that you went right is that maybe the GM shows you their notes or something after the campaign, its just pretty empty to me. Maybe even anti-meaningful in the same sense as the caveat around illusionism - if you can't tell which decisions will be meaningful, and arbitrary ones may be far more important than ones that *seem* important, it just encourages not trying to anticipate things at all...

[Biggus]

I broadly agree with you, but something you don't address is that in practice, it's difficult to impossible for all your decisions to be meaningful in a TTRPG. The DM only has so much time to prepare, and can't prepare a vast branching storyline with all the possibilities fully fleshed out, and many DMs wouldn't be willing to do so even if they could, knowing that 90%+ of the work they do will never be used. Good encounters take time and effort to make, so there's an argument that it's better to produce a limited numbers of interesting ones than a huge number of formulaic ones.

It also requires a certain type of player for delta to genuinely be high: in particular, one who's prepared to accept fairly regular TPKs, and who's happy with fairly regular breaks in the action while the DM works out the next bit. My group only plays for about 90-120 minutes per week (we're middle-aged, most of us have jobs and other commitments), so anything other than very short breaks in the action seriously eat into our playing time.

There are some things which can be done to mitigate this of course: in a world which is already realised in considerable detail like Forgotten Realms, more sandboxy games are easier to do. If it's the DM's homebrewed world that's not likely to be the case unless they've had a LOT of time to work on it.

So while the DM can give you a general idea of whether you're doing a prepared storyline or a sandbox game, and you certainly don't want all your decisions to be completely meaningless, I think your ideal of knowing whether a particular decision is meaningful isn't really possible in a lot of games; the best the DM can do is to make some of your decisions meaningful, but you don't know which ones, thus preserving the tension while not requiring near-infinite work on their part.

[Maat Mons]

Delta can also apply to things that aren't choices. For example - how meaningful are levels? In a sandbox game, they're pretty meaningful, because you're facing the same foes (at a given place) either way, so being higher level is going to turn "run away!" into "we can take them" and "we can take them" into "no problem". But if the opposition always scales with the PCs, levels become less meaningful. It can still generate some delta if the style of interaction changes - for example, a 20th level 3.5E party facing CR 20 foes is a fairly different gameplay experience than a 1st level party facing CR 1 foes (although it depends on the foes and the PCs - some classes don't change as much).

This is why I’ve really cooled on the numeric aspects of character advancement over the years. “Sandbox” games that always scale enemy spawns to your current level. Level scaling algorithms carefully crafted to undo all the numeric effects of being higher/lower level than an enemy. DM’s who add extra HP to monsters on the fly if they’re dying “too fast” or fudge dice rolls if the monsters are having trouble hitting the players’ AC. Skill check DC’s picked based on knowledge of the player’s skill modifier to ensure whatever failure chance the DM thinks all rolls should have.

What’s the point of being able to invest in offense if it doesn’t result in things dying faster? What’s the point of being able to invest in defense if it doesn’t result in taking fewer hits? What’s the point of becoming a master of lockpicking if it causes all the locks in the kingdom to spontaneously become higher quality?

There’s a quote I can’t remember the source of, which was something like “If high levels are just low levels with bigger numbers, there’s no point to having them.” I very much agree with this sentiment. If being a level 20 Fighter fighting a level 20 Goblin feels the same as being a Level 1 Fighter fighting a level 1 Goblin, then the progression of both the Fighter and Goblin are horrendously designed. This is the true root cause of the martial/caster divide. “High level” martials are just low level characters with inflated numbers. High level casters actually have more meaningful choices available to them than low level characters.

[Atranen]

A good, and imo accurate, summary of an important concept. I like Sid Meier's take on it: "A game is a series of meaningful choices". To the extent RPGs are a game, the players need to be able to make choices and have those choices matter. I also like GMs who telegraph more information for this reason--DCs and the like--because it let's the players make informed choices.

I think one of the biggest divide in RPGs is where those choices are being made. In D&D, the focus has shifted more to "pre game" choices, i.e. character builds. Your important choices are what fear to take, how to divide your class levels, what spells/maneuvers to select, etc. Story games and the OSR are both responding to this, in different ways, by redirecting the meaningful choices to be primarily in-game. There aren't as much "builds" or optimization discussions, but there's a greater emphasis on choices that affect the narrative.

[MoiMagnus]

I broadly agree with you, but something you don't address is that in practice, it's difficult to impossible for all your decisions to be meaningful in a TTRPG. The DM only has so much time to prepare, and can't prepare a vast branching storyline with all the possibilities fully fleshed out, and many DMs wouldn't be willing to do so even if they could, knowing that 90%+ of the work they do will never be used. Good encounters take time and effort to make, so there's an argument that it's better to produce a limited numbers of interesting ones than a huge number of formulaic ones.

A small sideline here is that it's much easier to have a high delta if the GM does almost zero preparation and almost exclusively build things from what the players are suggesting. Like "for this heist, there was no vents planned in the building before the players ask if there was vents, and since they ask about it there is now a vent path that is quite practical" but for everything.

But maximising the delta is not the recipe for the perfect TTRPGs. Most players seek more than just "making meaningful decisions". There is a balance with other objectives, including "puzzle solving".

At its extreme, when you're puzzle solving, there is a "unique good solutions" and you're searching for it.

But in TTRPGs, the best scenes are usually a balance of both puzzle solving and making meaningful decisions. It's not just about making decisions that have are meaningful, it's also about those decisions being validated as "good"* by a consistent universe, and the result of the decisions should match how adequate they are to the puzzle at hand (and I'm not talking about riddles, I include here "combat encounters" as a special kind of puzzles, and so are simple actions like "travelling from city A to city B"). And crafting actually good puzzles/encounters take time, and how much player freedom will be compatible with the crafted puzzle is always a difficult balance.

*EDIT: well, making bad decisions can also be fun, but it's more fun when their bad consequences come from the "how the universe works" rather than coming out of the GM trying to make that bad decision meaningful at all cost.

[NichG]

Bottlenecks make things harder. If you project the consequence of a set of decisions to win/lose or good/bad, you've got at most one bit worth of connection between choices and outcomes.

If on the other hand you have consequences with a lot more detail - different costs, different directions things go in, etc - then it's easy to have every choice cause a change.

'What sorts of stories do the citizens of the New Empire tell about your character' is a much vaster space than 'Do you overthrow the old regime or not?'

[Jay R]

It depends on what level you’re looking at.

On the highest level, it’s a game. No matter what happens, when we’re done playing, we go on with our lives. The choices had no effect outside the game. Like watching a movie, it’s a pleasant way to turn 7:00 into 10:00.

But nobody thinks like that. We care if we win a game of chess or Monopoly. Go one level down, and we now examine what effects our choices have on the game.

In the original game of D&D, in which characters can and will die if they lose a fight, all choices were meaningful, and obviously so. If our characters don’t defeat (or escape) these ogres, they will die. And nobody ever had to ask if our choices were meaningful.

In the modern approach, with CR and the idea that characters won’t ever die, no choice will ever be as meaningful as they were in early games.

They can still be meaningful. If one choice leads to enough XPs to level up to a great new ability, and the other choice doesn’t, then the choice mattered – it affected what I can do next.

In the biggest sense, the choices in a modern game don’t have much effect. No matter what, after a few encounters, we will level up. We will eventually fulfill the quest, find the Mace of Guffin, save the kingdom, etc.

The meaning comes on the smaller level – my bard successfully talked the goblins into letting us pass, instead of our having to fight them. I bought a headband of intellect instead of gloves of dexterity. That affects what options I will have when we face the orcs next time.

What you are calling merely “cosmetic choices” are in fact the actual game. In the same way, we could call whether our PC dies a "cosmetic choice". If he dies, I’ll just create another one. What difference did it make?

So the real answer is to care about the cosmetic things within the game. Going up a level, gaining a magic item, using illusions instead of summoning, etc. Those things matter to my character. If I’m role-playing him, then they should matter to me.

[kyoryu]

So the real answer is to care about the cosmetic things within the game. Going up a level, gaining a magic item, using illusions instead of summoning, etc. Those things matter to my character. If I’m role-playing him, then they should matter to me.

I think the best thing is to understand:

a) what it is you look for in a game
b) what the game is offering
c) your ability to enjoy what the game is offering

If you're looking for a game where you can effect plot-level things, then you're not going to be happy in a more linear game.

If you're looking for a game where you succeed or fail due to your build, you won't be happy in a game where that's not the case.

I don't think telling people to not have preferences is useful (though flexibility is obviously good). I think telling them to understand their preferences, be clear in expressing them, and understanding the game they're getting into is a lot more useful advice. And if you join a game not to your preferences? Do so willingly, and expect that some of your wants won't be met, so just almost treat it like a different type of thing entirely.

RPGs aren't a single hobby, really. They're a collection of vaguely-related hobbies.

[KorvinStarmast]

RPGs aren't a single hobby, really. They're a collection of vaguely-related hobbies. The most accurate version of "a single unified theory of TTRPG" I've seen. :smallsmile:

For the OP: meaningful is subjective.

[Easy e]

Sid is right in that games are about meaningful choices. The devil is in the details in what makes a decision meaningful.

Broadly speaking there are two types of decisions that should be split into Strategic and Tactical. Strategic are all the decision you make outside of the adventure, so char-gen, crafting, logistics, etc. Tactical decisions are the ones you make in-game such as routes to take, order of attacks, watch schedules, etc. Both those levels have different meaningful choices.

However, there is a third layer that are the wild card, the "Fun Factor". Unfortunately, that varies from player-to-player AND the players often don't know what exactly they find fun. To make it even worse, what one player considers FUN another player at the table will find NOT FUN. FUN is often on a per-player continuum and it impacts what is a meaningful choice to them.

That is a lot for a GM to juggle, but they can do it better than any distant Game Designer can. That is the beauty of RPGs, the GM can adjust them on the fly to meet the needs of the table in the moment.

[AceOfFools]

…
In the original game of D&D, in which characters can and will die if they lose a fight, all choices were meaningful, and obviously so. If our characters don’t defeat (or escape) these ogres, they will die. And nobody ever had to ask if our choices were meaningful.

In the modern approach, with CR and the idea that characters won’t ever die, no choice will ever be as meaningful as they were in early games.

...

Allow me to point out how old the cliche of “Rolling an identical character to the one who just died is.”

When my rogue died in AD&D, I rolled up his twin brother (because I rolled identical stats, it was too funny not to). I maybe lost some XP.

In my most recent game, using a way more modern system where characters couldn’t die, a character’s refusal to dump her ****ty girlfriend brought down a thousand year empire.

I’ve read pre-published adventures that included discussions about how to get the level appropriate encounters in without breaking the illusion of a static hexcrawl.

How much Delta a campaign has is entirely dependent on the GM and players, not at all a function of game style.

[kyoryu]

How much Delta a campaign has is entirely dependent on the GM and players, not at all a function of game style.

It's also possible to have "Delta" in various areas. Some people care about some areas more than others.

People have talked about D&D - in some ways I actually think that the increased complexity of builds in late 2e and 3e era was due to the more linear style of adventures that became popular - in essence, shifting Delta from "what happens in the game" to "how I build my character".

[Jay R]

Allow me to point out how old the cliche of “Rolling an identical character to the one who just died is.”

When my rogue died in AD&D, I rolled up his twin brother (because I rolled identical stats, it was too funny not to). I maybe lost some XP.

Agreed – this is from AD&D, not the original game of D&D I was talking about. And even so, you rolled an absurdly unlikely result.

But without a weird result from the dice, we *couldn't* just play an identical character. When my first Fighting Man died, I rolled up a character with 18 CHA. This one was a paladin (the first one our group had ever seen).

The cliché of “Rolling an identical character to the one who just died is" couldn't happen in the first several years of my playing – not when we rolled 3d6 in order.


How much Delta a campaign has is entirely dependent on the GM and players, not at all a function of game style.

It is now, yes. But in original D&D, character death was a possible result of the PC's actions. And so those actions were inherently meaningful. I know exactly what stupid choice led to the death of my thief Luthor.

---

On a separate issue, I like Sid Meier’s definition of a game as a series of meaningful choices. It fits the game theory definition I studied in math. But we need to be precise in what we think of as “meaningful”. It’s not merely that the choice has an effect, but also that the choice had clear meaning to the player when chosen.

Suppose the GM tells you that your PC has two levers in front of her. Pulling one of them will kill your PC, allowing the great evil wizard to take over the kingdom. The other lever will defeat the wizard, allowing you to have all his treasure, to save the kingdom, and to be proclaimed the Great Hero of the Age. But you don’t know which is which.

This effect of this choice is meaningful, in the sense that it will affect the game situation. But the choice is not meaningful.

By contrast, suppose your character can buy a wand of either magic missiles or grease. In the long run, it will make very little difference on the game world – probably none. In either case, you will defeat the orcs and get the treasure. But how you do it – what actions you take in the battle – will be greatly affected. If you know which wand is which, then this is a meaningful choice.

[Atranen]

People have talked about D&D - in some ways I actually think that the increased complexity of builds in late 2e and 3e era was due to the more linear style of adventures that became popular - in essence, shifting Delta from "what happens in the game" to "how I build my character".

Yeah. Which way do you think this operated? More complex builds --> less comfort with character death --> more linear gameplay, or more linear gameplay --> less meaningful in game choices --> a new focus on builds?



Agreed – this is from AD&D, not the original game of D&D I was talking about. And even so, you rolled an absurdly unlikely result.

But without a weird result from the dice, we *couldn't* just play an identical character. When my first Fighting Man died, I rolled up a character with 18 CHA. This one was a paladin (the first one our group had ever seen).

The cliché of “Rolling an identical character to the one who just died is" couldn't happen in the first several years of my playing – not when we rolled 3d6 in order.

Agreed. The more lethal games I've played in don't have this issue, and all of the characters feel unique; randomized generation does a lot. If this is happening, it may be a mis match between what the players want (persistent characters) and the game structure.


On a separate issue, I like Sid Meier’s definition of a game as a series of meaningful choices. It fits the game theory definition I studied in math. But we need to be precise in what we think of as “meaningful”. It’s not merely that the choice has an effect, but also that the choice had clear meaning to the player when chosen.

I also agree this is very important. Imo, DMs should be very generous with the information they give players, either about the description of the world, the difficulty of certain tasks (by giving DCs often), how much health enemies have, and the like, so that players can make informed choices.

[NichG]

I don't agree that character death is what inherently makes things meaningful.

I mean, if we're talking AD&D, I was in an AD&D campaign where one of the players lost their character literally before they had a chance to do anything - rolled it up, joined our group, we had a random wilderness encounter, an enemy that won initiative one-shotted them.

I'd say that living with the consequences of your decisions has a lot more potential to support meaning. That can mean you the player living with the consequence of not being able to play a character you liked, sure. But it can also mean, e.g., spending the next 6 sessions in a regency romance politics arc rather than fighting a dinosaur army. Or a wilderness arc where there will be no shopping for anything for the next 3 months of real time - a choice whose consequences will transcend character death since it'd be as true for a newly introduced replacement character as your veterans.

The Wand of Grease vs Wand of Magic Missiles thing is like that. What makes it meaningful is that you're going to spend the next several months of the campaign viewing encounters from the point of view of 'can I solve this with Grease?' versus the point of view of 'can I solve this with Magic Missile?', at least a little bit. If you like the feeling of trying to figure out weird ways to use Grease to resolve things, versus the more direct 'add damage to things until they die' of Magic Missile, then it's going to matter a lot to you that you committed to one path versus the other.

And it could be a visible choice if and when you go back and tell the story of that campaign. That storytelling isn't just going to be 'we won', its going to be the bits you personally thought were cool or surprising or revelatory or funny. 'Remember that time we Greased the ropes on a pirate ship and half of their boarders fell into the water before they could get to our ship?'. The specifics of what people find meaningful will vary from person to person, sure. But there is still a commonality that if each person went back and told the story of what they remember of the campaign, the meaningful choices were the ones that let that person recognize their own place in that story - the stuff where the story would have been different (in the way the person cares about) if it had been some other player playing through it.

[KorvinStarmast]

It is now, yes. But in original D&D, character death was a possible result of the PC's actions. And so those actions were inherently meaningful. So were the choices that went into "he we got to the third level of the dungeon, and out again, without dying. The HOW was the fun. (As was the bit of luck sometimes needed).

By contrast, suppose your character can buy a wand of either magic missiles or grease. In the long run, it will make very little difference on the game world – probably none. In either case, you will defeat the orcs and get the treasure. But how you do it – what actions you take in the battle – will be greatly affected. If you know which wand is which, then this is a meaningful choice. We have a winner. The how is what makes each party's story unique.

I don't agree that character death is what inherently makes things meaningful. It is one of the things that does, not the only thing that does.

Heh, original Traveler: combat could make you reach for that next index card with the back up character on it ...

[kyoryu]

Yeah. Which way do you think this operated? More complex builds --> less comfort with character death --> more linear gameplay, or more linear gameplay --> less meaningful in game choices --> a new focus on builds?

Given that Dragonlance kinda started the switch during the AD&D timeline, I'm pretty sure it's the latter. At least in D&D-land.

Also, I think that led to a lowered comfort with character death - when you've got a single party with 4-6 people, it's different than when you've got 20 or so occasional players, each of whom might have a half dozen characters.

The analogy I usually use is that losing a character in an open table game is kinda like losing a soldier in XCOM, while losing one in a long-term story campaign is more like deleting your Skyrim save. The first can suck. The second SUCKS.


Agreed. The more lethal games I've played in don't have this issue, and all of the characters feel unique; randomized generation does a lot. If this is happening, it may be a mis match between what the players want (persistent characters) and the game structure.

Most lethal games call back to old-school games in some way, and those have a much greater emphasis on "dealing with what you've been given" as opposed to "designing the perfect thing". They're two different playstyles, and are both pretty fun if done right.

See again: RPGs are not a single hobby.


I also agree this is very important. Imo, DMs should be very generous with the information they give players, either about the description of the world, the difficulty of certain tasks (by giving DCs often), how much health enemies have, and the like, so that players can make informed choices.

Absolutely. Players making informed choices (which may have downsides that they know about) is to me a lot more interesting than players bumbling about trying not to step on land mines.

[NichG]

It is one of the things that does, not the only thing that does.

Heh, original Traveler: combat could make you reach for that next index card with the back up character on it ...

My point is that intensifying the valence of a consequence has diminishing returns compared to enriching the space of possible consequences. Once someone already feels a consequence is meaningful, intensifying the consequence further doesn't actually increase the meaningfulness anymore. Win/lose, die/live can be very intense but they're still only one bit worth of information. And the nature of something like character death as the go-to consequence has a tendency to render lots of other past decisions meaningless, because it's a bottleneck that discards any information that was associated with the character.

So if someone wanted to make their campaign have more meaningful delta, I wouldn't recommend 'just make it more lethal!'. Instead I'd recommend that the GM pay more careful attention to how things get resolved over whether things get resolved, and act to keep the details of the 'how' relevant. If you killed the invading orc army with fireballs, NPCs remember that - someone shows up asking to be the party wizard's apprentice because of how cool it was when the wizard smoked those orcs, etc. If someone took a heavy hit and kept on fighting, NPCs comment on that, tell the story, maybe that PC gets offered a knighthood, maybe a wandering warrior shows up to challenge that PC to a test of endurance or bravery or whatever, etc.

Doesn't even have to be an 'encounter'. The PCs are entering a city and there are a handful of NPCs around involved in various activities - someone is being harassed by a guard, someone else seems to be running a three-card monty scam, there's someone who seems lost, etc. Don't try to make any of them critical to the 'plot', but if the PCs do choose one to get involved in, the NPC might become a recurring contact or friend or rival - or not - who not only just has interactions and is around but might be the way the PCs end up having a chance to get involved in this or that side-adventure. Make it so that noticing things, choosing between things to do and ways to approach people, etc all have long-term consequences. Not in the 'character dies' sense, but in the sense of shaping what the campaign will look like in 10 sessions.

If you make a habit of caring about the details rather than having the world aggressively summarize things down into 'we won' or 'we lost' and make sure that habit comes across to the players then you're creating lots of opportunities for the story to diverge, and you're creating a table culture where players can expect that some offhand comment or detail or interaction could actually matter. And that will also help your players start caring about remembering those things, which in turn will gradually grow their ability to find more and more things meaningful. Not even just in an aesthetic sense, but in the sense of understanding that choosing to be polite or brusque or aggressive or seductive or whatever to a tavern keeper is actually something that isn't just going to be forgotten when the scene ends.

[KorvinStarmast]

Nick, that's a lot of words.

The how is what makes each party's story unique. same goes for "the how" making each PC's story/journey unique.

Doesn't even have to be an 'encounter'
Concur. It's a matter of interacting with the imaginary world.

[AceOfFools]

Having thought about it, high lethality is probably bad for Delta; at least how high lethality works in my limited experience with the old DnD editions and OSR games.

If a single bad roll in combat can kill you, you might have the massive and irreversible consequence of death as a result of no choice of their own. I know two people from different states whose parents’ lost a character to surprise beholder ambush. The only choice they made was “Yes, GM, I would like to play your game.”

Or you could do everything possible, and still die. I had a 3.5 rogue participate in a surprise ambush on a beholder, fight defensively with save-boosting buffs, and still get petrified by a pair of unlucky rolls. If the adventure hadn’t deliberately included “fix petrification” scrolls as loot, it would have been permanent. “Do we fight the boss monster actively working to destroy the world?” isn’t a meaningful choice in a DnD game. We signed up to play a game specifically to fight boss monsters and save the world. We made that choice when we decided to play DnD as heroes. There wasn’t a build possible that could have dodged that ray on the beholders mat 18, nor one that would have made the fort saved on the nat 4 (ish) I rolled.

[KorvinStarmast]

We signed up to play a game specifically to fight boss monsters and save the world. Or die trying. That is the narrative tension present in a lot of stories and movies and comics and TV shows: that going out to save the world may get you killed.
a. The movie Armageddon (1998) for another example of "the protagonist dies" (or one of them does, in any case).
b. Wash in Serinity is but one example of "dead" in what was something like a Traveler based kind of adventure Traveler, original, was quite Old School in its framing.
c. One of the things that I liked about Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire (the books) is that 'heroes' and major characters get killed along the way (albeit quite a few of the heroes are something less than heroic).

We made that choice when we decided to play DnD as heroes. There wasn’t a build possible that could have dodged that ray on the beholders mat 18, nor one that would have made the fort saved on the nat 4 (ish) I rolled. Without the chance of failure, there is no success.
Sun Tzu once wrote: the acme of skill is to win without fighting. (Or something very close to that).

"The heroes are guaranteed to win" is a story, I suppose, but it's a story that lacks tension and (perhaps) meaning.

[NichG]

In all my recent campaigns there's always been at least one conversation of the form 'what does victory look like to us?'. The heroes can be guaranteed to win, but defining the shape of that win can be harder than actually executing it. So the tension and surprise is in seeing how the journey towards that win shapes different characters' views on what the world should look like in the aftermath.

E.g. in the current campaign that 'win' looks like one of the characters being the head of a media empire, another character implementing psychic machinery that lets the wronged dead can exact karmic retribution against societal structures that led to that harm, and the third character wants to officially be recognized as the rightful owner of the moon.

[kyoryu]

Having thought about it, high lethality is probably bad for Delta; at least how high lethality works in my limited experience with the old DnD editions and OSR games.

If a single bad roll in combat can kill you, you might have the massive and irreversible consequence of death as a result of no choice of their own. I know two people from different states whose parents’ lost a character to surprise beholder ambush. The only choice they made was “Yes, GM, I would like to play your game.”

Or you could do everything possible, and still die. I had a 3.5 rogue participate in a surprise ambush on a beholder, fight defensively with save-boosting buffs, and still get petrified by a pair of unlucky rolls. If the adventure hadn’t deliberately included “fix petrification” scrolls as loot, it would have been permanent. “Do we fight the boss monster actively working to destroy the world?” isn’t a meaningful choice in a DnD game. We signed up to play a game specifically to fight boss monsters and save the world. We made that choice when we decided to play DnD as heroes. There wasn’t a build possible that could have dodged that ray on the beholders mat 18, nor one that would have made the fort saved on the nat 4 (ish) I rolled.

I don't know that high lethality is bad for Delta V (getting beyond the "failure doesn't have to mean death" discussion). What's important is that failure/death be, at some level, the result of decisions made, and preferably the result of multiple decisions made.

If you make a decision to charge a group of enemies by yourself, get beat up, refuse to retreat, and finally get killed? I find that perfectly in line with Delta V. If you're walking along in "cut scene time", there's an ambush that you had no ability to avoid, you roll for surprise and lose, the enemy takes their shot and kills you, that absolutely screws with Delta V. There's a result there that was not really a result of any decision you made.

I mean, this really kinda all boils down to "decisions should have consequences". And those should be positive as well as negative. But negative consequences, especially, must be the result of decisions..

So it's really two rules, put together.

1. Decisions should have consequences
2. Consequences (especially negative) should be the result of decisions.

Either way can be a recipe for failure. Being clear about where the players can have meaningful decisions (aka ones with consequences) is also a useful step.

[Atranen]

Having thought about it, high lethality is probably bad for Delta; at least how high lethality works in my limited experience with the old DnD editions and OSR games.

If a single bad roll in combat can kill you, you might have the massive and irreversible consequence of death as a result of no choice of their own. I know two people from different states whose parents’ lost a character to surprise beholder ambush. The only choice they made was “Yes, GM, I would like to play your game.”

Or you could do everything possible, and still die. I had a 3.5 rogue participate in a surprise ambush on a beholder, fight defensively with save-boosting buffs, and still get petrified by a pair of unlucky rolls. If the adventure hadn’t deliberately included “fix petrification” scrolls as loot, it would have been permanent. “Do we fight the boss monster actively working to destroy the world?” isn’t a meaningful choice in a DnD game. We signed up to play a game specifically to fight boss monsters and save the world. We made that choice when we decided to play DnD as heroes. There wasn’t a build possible that could have dodged that ray on the beholders mat 18, nor one that would have made the fort saved on the nat 4 (ish) I rolled.

It depends what you mean by high lethality. It depends on the kind of campaign. For more narrative, I like PC deaths every ~10 sessions, while for games with "character stables" about twice as often. The point is for 1) the players to know the threat of death is real without 2) death occuring so often as to cut the dramatic tension.

The "surprise beholder ambush" doesn't feel great to me. The rogue dying does; they played well, but made the choice to fight against a beholder. I think that kind of fight should always have the threat of death.

[Ixtellor]

Read lots of good answers.

1) If characters can't die, then their choices are already limited. If players know they can't really die, then they will gladly charge into death. Having enemies that can 1 shot you before you can react is not going to make the game fun or promote agency. In the OG days when you rolled up the elf with 1 hit point... it never really resulted in a fun game. Most groups/DM'
s learned how to fix this, to remove the 'high lethality'. But lethality HAS to be on the table. Or you get the "You find a bottle labeled 'Poison'. Your player declares "I drink it all down" because you taught them their choices don't actually matter. Kyorya nailed this answer earlier.

2) NichG, nailed it. You can have 'encounters' that don't seem like they have meaning, but a good DM can make that choice matter in the future. IE You helped a merchant repair his wagon and load up his goods after an accident --- that merchant or his kin can make an appearance at any point in the future, and like good fantasy writers, the merchant can show up when it matters. (Billion examples --- Youre being chased by a thieves guild through a busy city, the merchant recognized you from long ago and offers you a place to hide, then convinces the thieves you aren't there, etc) There are lots of ways to escape a chase, but using the old choices just makes the 'story' more alive and interesting.

3) I'm an old guy, high school teacher, and I have students that play. They all play the railroad story line version of D&D.
I just think your not going to get into the depth RPG have to offer if you stay at this level. I'd say play World of Warcraft if thats your thing. RPG's have the ability to invoke strong and very memorable emotions once you move away from the story/puzzle game version of RPG's.

[icefractal]

To answer what a number of people have mentioned - no, I don't think every aspect of a game needs maximum delta. I was thinking about "how much delta is enough?" and came to the conclusion that (for me) it's about total delta vs total effort.

So all of these are fine by me:
* A game where there's little mechanical delta, but the IC decisions you make are important and change the path of the story considerably.
* A game where the plot is pretty linear, but the mechanics have plenty of delta and the opposition doesn't auto-scale, so you can consider the whole thing as a challenge (this is how I'd consider most PF1 adventure paths, IME).
* A game where there's not much delta (IC or mechanically) but it's also low-effort - easy char-gen, no need to go try-hard mode in battle, RP leans more light with no expectation of stress bleed.

But this would be like kryptonite:
* A game where the plot is pretty linear, mechanics are constrained so you can't 'get ahead' at all but still requires significant focus while playing, and the RP is serious with a lot of stress involved IC and likely bleed.

Now I'm sure some people are reading that last description and thinking "What's the problem? Sounds like a fine game to me." Obviously YMMV on what's important. But that's where my thinking's at.

[KorvinStarmast]

In all my recent campaigns there's always been at least one conversation of the form 'what does victory look like to us?'. The heroes can be guaranteed to win, but defining the shape of that win can be harder than actually executing it. So the tension and surprise is in seeing how the journey towards that win shapes different characters' views on what the world should look like in the aftermath. It for sure can work that way, yes, and in this case system will matter quite a bit.

3) I'm an old guy, high school teacher, and I have students that play. They all play the railroad story line version of D&D. I just think your not going to get into the depth RPG have to offer if you stay at this level. I'd say play World of Warcraft if thats your thing. Yes.
It is no accident, though, that plenty of modern players do come to the hobby from something like WoW, and they bring their assumptions with them.

I was thinking about "how much delta is enough?" and came to the conclusion that (for me) it's about total delta vs total effort.

Nice all around post, +1.

[Duff]

It is now, yes. But in original D&D, character death was a possible result of the PC's actions. And so those actions were inherently meaningful. I know exactly what stupid choice led to the death of my thief Luthor. .

An observatin - The 5e game I'm currently in had 3/5 of the party die at 3rd level when our cleric followed my bard into the spiritual guardians of the enmey cleric.
My tabaxi bard had the speed to get back out again and the cleric did not. Monk down, cleric down and one round later the fighter's down as well. I run away from the zombie, the other monk runs off in the other direction and we meet back in town to form a new party.

Death is still on the table.
And if it's present but rare, then it means more when it does come up

[AceOfFools]

What's important is that failure/death be, at some level, the result of decisions made, and preferably the result of multiple decisions made.

…

1. Decisions should have consequences
2. Consequences (especially negative) should be the result of decisions.


This is exactly my point.

In the first attack a group picks a direction based on a die roll, fails some whatever-they-called-spot-checks-in-the-80s, two more bad rolls later, and characters was dead.

In the second, the party did decide to head into some cool sounding ruins, but the ambush was considered otherwise unfair. One “we have to pick something, I guess” and one bad roll, and dead.

The beholder I fought was the Boss Monster of the scenario, planned from the campaign start. When we started a game an out hunting monsters to save the world (or, y’know, one small city), we were deciding to take on this monster. We managed to find out there was a beholder, pack on every advantage we could—including an ambush, and then despite every decision we did made—including forgoing a sneak attack due to fighting defensively—and two unlucky rolls and I was dead anyway.

The fact that a few die rolls can make a character die, no choices beyond “let’s play the game” can cause dire consequences.

Playing under rules where “your character cannot die, unless you agree it’s the narratively appropriate outcome,” makes all character deaths absolutely meaningful choices of the player by default.

And as long as you’re playing under the paradigm of wanting for the opportunity for high Delta—to make meaningful choices, rather than wanting to “win”, you can make that most meaningful choice.

My favorite character death was the result of a failed strength check in a DnD 4e game. I asked the GM if, instead of the child being pulled into the hell portal, if I could push between the child and the demon instead drag my character to hell instead. He said “…yes”, and we later decided that the choice for the character would be more meaningful if, instead of the planned hell rescue followup quest, we left that character to his fate.

This is was an extremely high Delta moment, one that only happened because of a single unlucky roll (mostly). It could only happen because the system didn’t force it (the normal result of a failed check was the child was pried from your hands).

[kyoryu]

This is exactly my point.

In the first attack a group picks a direction based on a die roll, fails some whatever-they-called-spot-checks-in-the-80s, two more bad rolls later, and characters was dead.

In the second, the party did decide to head into some cool sounding ruins, but the ambush was considered otherwise unfair. One “we have to pick something, I guess” and one bad roll, and dead.

The beholder I fought was the Boss Monster of the scenario, planned from the campaign start. When we started a game an out hunting monsters to save the world (or, y’know, one small city), we were deciding to take on this monster. We managed to find out there was a beholder, pack on every advantage we could—including an ambush, and then despite every decision we did made—including forgoing a sneak attack due to fighting defensively—and two unlucky rolls and I was dead anyway.

The fact that a few die rolls can make a character die, no choices beyond “let’s play the game” can cause dire consequences.

Playing under rules where “your character cannot die, unless you agree it’s the narratively appropriate outcome,” makes all character deaths absolutely meaningful choices of the player by default.

And as long as you’re playing under the paradigm of wanting for the opportunity for high Delta—to make meaningful choices, rather than wanting to “win”, you can make that most meaningful choice.

My favorite character death was the result of a failed strength check in a DnD 4e game. I asked the GM if, instead of the child being pulled into the hell portal, if I could push between the child and the demon instead drag my character to hell instead. He said “…yes”, and we later decided that the choice for the character would be more meaningful if, instead of the planned hell rescue followup quest, we left that character to his fate.

This is was an extremely high Delta moment, one that only happened because of a single unlucky roll (mostly). It could only happen because the system didn’t force it (the normal result of a failed check was the child was pried from your hands).

I think there's also something in there about consequences either being extremely obvious, or the result of multiple decisions.

Like, in your case, you basically knew the choice you were making, and made it. That can be a one-and-done.

In the second, just a couple of bad rolls (at best), for things that should have been moderately benign, led to death. (Since you're adventurers, and you're supposed to adventure, choosing to do baseline adventurer stuff shouldn't really be considered an obvious indicator of death, otherwise boring game). That's not as cool. Failing a spot check can put you in a worse position, but shouldn't just straight up murder you.

[Easy e]

Some of my favorite games are explicit that your character can not die. Note, that doesn't mean they succeed either. There are many fail states, often dying is the easiest one and doesn't create tension in and of itself. This fixation on dying as the only fail state is a clear D&D-ism.

Dying only matters if your death leads to some larger stakes or outcomes. If you dying just means roll-up a replacement, that is not inherently tension, it is just annoying. I really hate dying for no reason.

The time I died when I got mobbed by Goblins and stabbed to death in session 1? Just annoying that I bothered to put anytime in making a character beyond the numbers in the first place. The time I made a character and got killed on my first die roll of a d6 Star Wars game, just annoying. Dying in a long running campaign thanks to a "Save or Die" in the middle of the campaign, just annoying as I was the only one going through "new player" mode in a well-established group. In those situations, I learned to not care about my character as they were just an expendable game token, no more, no less. Who cares if I walk face first into a death trap? No one. If I LeRoy Jenkins a dragon by myself? No one. Just make a new token! Boring.

As a player, I have no problem dying as a character for some stakes or reason though. In a game where I can not explicitly die, I actually had my character die to prove a larger spiritual, moral, and ethical point. In a different game, my player purposely performed a "last stand" so others could escape and save the world later when they would not have been able to otherwise. I had no issue with those, and it really drove the story and character forward for everyone else.

Death has no inherent stakes or is a better fail state in a game.

[KorvinStarmast]

I think there's also something in there about consequences either being extremely obvious, or the result of multiple decisions. That cancels out mystery or hidden antagonist games, like the Rashasa crime lord ...

This fixation on dying as the only fail state is a clear D&D-ism.
Incorrect. I'll offer two examples that are not D&D.
1. Traveler, the original. You did a lot of stuff and you took a lot of care not to die.
2. Mothership (recent sci fi horror). Death is gonna happen. We have had two PCs die already.

[Easy e]

That cancels out mystery or hidden antagonist games, like the Rashasa crime lord ...

Incorrect. I'll offer two examples that are not D&D.
1. Traveler, the original. You did a lot of stuff and you took a lot of care not to die.
2. Mothership (recent sci fi horror). Death is gonna happen. We have had two PCs die already.

More games than D&D can have a D&D-ism. Horror, especially survival horror; is a different beast completely.

However, that is completely besides the point of what I was discussing. Death is not an effective fail-state as there are very few stakes in dying in an RPG. You just make a new character and "re-spawn". Nothing is really lost, it is just a distraction, annoying or a hassle.

[Atranen]

Making a new character, having to integrate them into the party, possibly losing exp and levels, losing a connection with someone you've developed...ime there are substantial stakes to character death in RPGs.

[Vahnavoi]

More games than D&D can have a D&D-ism. Horror, especially survival horror; is a different beast completely.

Character elimination as a loss condition is ubiquituous in all sorts of games, many predating D&D, so calling it a D&D-ism is a stretch. There's a very simple reason for that: in a game where a player primaly participates through their character, character elimination is equal to player elimination, and a natural stopping point for that player. Note that "character" and "token" are exchangeable in the previous sentence. Equating loss of character with loss of a token doesn't somehow prove character loss isn't a consequence - losing game tokens is a basic game consequence.


However, that is completely besides the point of what I was discussing. Death is not an effective fail-state as there are very few stakes in dying in an RPG. You just make a new character and "re-spawn". Nothing is really lost, it is just a distraction, annoying or a hassle.

This is equivalent to saying losing game tokens isn't an effective fail state because you can just start over if you lose. The flaw in logic should be obvious.

The actual way games work is that the annoyance of losing your tokens and having your participation end - losing a game, in short - is the consequence you're trying to avoid. Don't like spending time making a new character? Play better so your characters last longer.

The real flaw you and AceOfFools observed has more to do with a game ending randomly - it isn't possible to play better because the game wasn't lost by any action on the player's part.

It's worth noting that a lot of things that seem random or unable to be counterplayed in a single game, might not be so across an extended game where the situation is repeated multiple times. A basilisk is a great example. Yes, the first time you encounter a basilisk, it might be an out-of-nowhere instant game over. The second time, you know a basilisk might be in the game, and can employ various counter-strategies (divination spells to find out where it is, amulets to protect from petrification or magical darkness or indirect fire to stay out of line-of-sight, etc.).

It being easy to replace a character goes hand in hand with extended play, where such learning through trial and error is expected and normal.

[warty goblin]

If you want rolling the dice to be meaningful, i.e. have a potential impact on the outcome, then you have to be able to win or lose by luck. Saying you shouldn't ever lose because of bad luck is equivalent to saying you should never win by luck and also that you shouldn't have luck at all, at which point you're better off playing chess. Basically if you include meaningful dice, you're making the meaningful choice to win or lose randomly.

[Vahnavoi]

@warty goblin: it isn't quite that simple. A game can have meaningful randomness while still having winning and losing be deterministic based on player ability.

A simple example would be a randomized hexcrawl, where each possible hex has a distinct puzzle - but each puzzle is individually solvable and deterministic. Every played game can hence have different sequence and stopping point (dependent on player skill) without "luck" being real determinant.

This said, most popular dice-based engines aren't set up in this way. They are instead straightforward gambles on game resources, character life included. In such games, there is a hard statistical cap to frequency of success and even the best possible game strategy will lose some amount of time. For example, every published version of D&D is in this boat.

The spirit of your statement is still correct - don't play a game of chance if you can't accept possibility of losing by chance.

[KorvinStarmast]

Making a new character, having to integrate them into the party, possibly losing exp and levels, losing a connection with someone you've developed...ime there are substantial stakes to character death in RPGs. Yes.

Character elimination as a loss condition is ubiquituous in all sorts of games, many predating D&D, so calling it a D&D-ism is a stretch. As but two examples: Diplomacy(no dice) and Risk(yes dice).

The actual way games work is that the annoyance of losing your tokens and having your participation end - losing a game, in short - is the consequence you're trying to avoid. Don't like spending time making a new character? Play better so your characters last longer. I now await the Greek Chorus complaining that player skill shouldn't matter in an RPG ... :smallyuk:

It's worth noting that a lot of things that seem random or unable to be counterplayed in a single game, might not be so across an extended game where the situation is repeated multiple times. A basilisk is a great example. Yes, the first time you encounter a basilisk, it might be an out-of-nowhere instant game over. The second time, you know a basilisk might be in the game, and can employ various counter-strategies (divination spells to find out where it is, amulets to protect from petrification or magical darkness or indirect fire to stay out of line-of-sight, etc.).

It being easy to replace a character goes hand in hand with extended play, where such learning through trial and error is expected and normal. True with D&D, and also true with games like Diablo (the original, a dungeon crawl on a computer) that you can play through more than once with more than one starting character. The player likely will remember a few of the nastier surprises (the spitting dogs in the catacombs for example) when they try the game with the next choice. (Say they did their first play through with a warrior, their rogue attempt will have some player experience to aid them in approaching certain zones of the game).

A game can have meaningful randomness while still having winning and losing be deterministic based on player ability. Casino craps being one such.
The spirit of your statement is still correct - don't play a game of chance if you can't accept possibility of losing by chance. Craps again.

[Easy e]

You know what. I won't convince anyone else of my position that death doesn't matter in RPGs, and that is fine. The way I think about games and many people on this forum think about them is different. That is why I learn a lot about RPGs by reading these different takes and thoughts. Thank you all for sharing.

I will say that from my perspective the only "Meaningful" decision in an RPG game is when you decide to play and when you decide not to play. The rest doesn't matter. By playing you are embarking on a collaborative experience, and there is no winning or losing, there is only experiencing. The playing was either worth your time or it was not, and you often do not know which until it is all over.

The Play is the thing.

[icefractal]

True with D&D, and also true with games like Diablo (the original, a dungeon crawl on a computer) that you can play through more than once with more than one starting character. The player likely will remember a few of the nastier surprises (the spitting dogs in the catacombs for example) when they try the game with the next choice. (Say they did their first play through with a warrior, their rogue attempt will have some player experience to aid them in approaching certain zones of the game).
Maybe this is the disconnect for me? I've heard about these megadungeons where the party (or even different parties over time) kept returning to the same one, building up knowledge and slowly going deeper. But I've never seen that in practice. Even the more dungeon-crawl-heavy games I've been in, we went through a given dungeon once, and that was it.

So let's say I walk around the corner, foolishly thinking I can walk around corners with my eyes open, and get stoned. The rest of the party either avoids or slays the basilisk, and then we never return there. Unless it's a particularly large dungeon, my new character probably shows up after we're done with the whole thing.

Now true, basilisks in particular could leave telltale stone remains around (although so does a trap that petrifies people, which is something you'd definitely want your eyes open to avoid!), but there's also things like Bodaks which just leaves corpses. You're saying that if you saw an old corpse on the ground, your instinct would be "better close my eyes and navigate by touch/sound"?

[Vahnavoi]

Nope, that's not what's being said. Megadungeons are also tangential to the point - even if you only go through each dungeon once, that doesn't mean you will only meet a given enemy once.

So the first time you and your friends meet a basilisk, one of you suffers an instant game over - the rest deal with it or flee from it. Okay. Then you get to the next dungeon. Will you now approach it the exact same way as before, forgetting everything that happened with the basilisk?

For the record, it's possible to overpopulate a game with weird monsters, so that it becomes impossible for players to really learn anything from past experience. Some game masters do this on purpose because they have counter-productive ideas about player knowledge. If that's your experience, you have my sympathies, but please stop moving the goalposts by going "oh, what about that other monster then?".

[icefractal]

Then you get to the next dungeon. Will you now approach it the exact same way as before, forgetting everything that happened with the basilisk?Please describe to me the approach you take to dungeon delving, knowing that basilisks exist.


For the record, it's possible to overpopulate a game with weird monsters, so that it becomes impossible for players to really learn anything from past experience. Some game masters do this on purpose because they have counter-productive ideas about player knowledge. If that's your experience, you have my sympathies, but please stop moving the goalposts by going "oh, what about that other monster then?".I don't really think "two different monsters" is overpopulation, but my point was just that if someone was taking the stance that "all basilisks should be signposted by the petrified bodies of former victims" (what about wandering ones though?), then there are other insta-death monsters which don't leave a distinctive calling card like that.

Incidentally, Bodak is another creature that got changed to "not insta-death" in PF1, and I'd say the change is an improvement.


I wouldn't say that insta-death monsters reduce delta per-se (after all, it's not like you couldn't already lose and die entirely via bad luck in most systems, insta-kill stuff just makes it more likely), I just don't think they're usually a benefit for the game.

[warty goblin]

If one's philosophy is sufficiently simulationist/non-PCs-are-special, I don't think there's any inherent problem in some situations not having a solution and those situations not being the result of any obvious or predictable mistake.

[Devils_Advocate]

I agree that it's not inherently bad for some goals to prove unexpectedly unachievable, even by design. Seeing how characters cope with something like that can be interesting. I guess that the main question there is how often feels like "too much": At what point does it seem like our heroes should really just pick a new career?

Oh, and beware railroading, of course. Just like a GM shouldn't commit to a problem having exactly one solution, a GM shouldn't commit to a problem having exactly zero solutions. If the players find a way to do the "impossible", reward their ingenuity.


If you want rolling the dice to be meaningful, i.e. have a potential impact on the outcome, then you have to be able to win or lose by luck.
Potential results can significantly differ from each other in ways that don't make one clearly and straightforwardly "better" or "worse" than another, and that's often more interesting than degrees of clear-cut "success" or "failure".


Saying you shouldn't ever lose because of bad luck is equivalent to saying you should never win by luck and also that you shouldn't have luck at all, at which point you're better off playing chess.
Or an RPG without random elements, which feels like the more relevant alternative in this context.



On the highest level, it’s a game. No matter what happens, when we’re done playing, we go on with our lives. The choices had no effect outside the game. Like watching a movie, it’s a pleasant way to turn 7:00 into 10:00.
Stories can have lasting impacts on people. I, uh... don't think that it's really normal to engage with works of fiction, or with films and RPGs specifically, in an exclusively transient fashion? I have no statistics on this, but my suspicion is that you're the weird one there. Or perhaps I've misunderstood you.


We care if we win a game of chess or Monopoly.
I don't, and I'm sure I'm not alone. And I doubt that winning is of primary importance to a majority of gamers.


Trying to win is the most important part of the game.

Winning is kinda secondary.

I don't know if I make sense. On the same vein, if you meet Buddah on the road, kill him for 5,000 xp.


In the original game of D&D, in which characters can and will die if they lose a fight, all choices were meaningful, and obviously so. If our characters don’t defeat (or escape) these ogres, they will die. And nobody ever had to ask if our choices were meaningful.
But choices are only meaningful insofar as the variance in consequences is meaningful, not just to the extent that that variance exists. And the more regularly that player characters die, the more that players are discouraged from putting any actual, y'know, characterization into them (because it's not worth the effort to write up a detailed backstory nor personality for a character who's only going to last a few hours), instead of churning out a stream of nameless, faceless store brand adventurers whose only notable motive is the acquisition of wealth (as the default motivation for going into monster-infested dungeons is "that's where the treasure is").

Having to play Generic Fighter #378947 instead of Generic Fighter #378946 hardly seems like a terribly meaningful consequence.


But without a weird result from the dice, we *couldn't* just play an identical character. When my first Fighting Man died, I rolled up a character with 18 CHA. This one was a paladin (the first one our group had ever seen).

The cliché of “Rolling an identical character to the one who just died is" couldn't happen in the first several years of my playing – not when we rolled 3d6 in order.
"Having to play Generic Fighter #378947 instead of Generic Fighter #378946 hardly seems like a terribly meaningful consequence."
"But they're not the same. One of two Fighters might have higher bonuses to his attack and damage rolls, while the other has higher hit points."
"So what, though? Why would I particularly care?"
"Um, because those numbers determine the outcomes of combats? They decide whether characters live or die!"
"Yeah, but dying just means having to play Generic Fighter #378947 instead of Generic Fighter #378946, and that hardly seems like a terribly meaningful consequence."


In the same way, we could call whether our PC dies a "cosmetic choice". If he dies, I’ll just create another one. What difference did it make?
If the "character" was Generic Fighter #378946, no difference of note. But if the character was an ousted prince trying to avenge his murdered father, well, now we're talking. Then having him replaced by a previously-unmentioned brother upon his death would likely feel dissatisfying and jarringly silly, cheapening both the character and the story. Heck, even if such a brother does show up, there will probably be at least some focus on the differences between the two.

It's also potentially dissatisfying for that character to die to a random bandit ambush, so the "danger" is that GM will consequently avoid that. But that's not actually a problem, in the same sort of way in which it's not a problem if a character can't be killed in one blow by a particular adversary. One might argue "Having a lethal weapon swung at you should always carry the chance of death!" And the counterargument is that we're just not interested in anything like that sort of realism. Players don't just prefer that their characters live rather than die. Many would rather have them die to a goblin attack than to gangrene. And, similarly, to a wyvern attack than to a goblin attack, and so on and so forth. Cutting out the crappiest crap doesn't mean that some consequences aren't worse than others, nor does it drain events of meaning.

(And to anyone asking "If goblins aren't 'worthy' of killing the main characters, should they even be fighting such pathetic enemies?", I congratulate you on your keen insight.)

Taking character death off of the table entirely is obviously pretty restrictive, eliminating many possible sources of tension. But not having it take up half of the table makes more room for other stuff. One bit of information, to borrow from NichG, can only say so much.


So the real answer is to care about the cosmetic things within the game. Going up a level, gaining a magic item, using illusions instead of summoning, etc. Those things matter to my character. If I’m role-playing him, then they should matter to me.
There's a certain tension between "I don't want my character to die" and "I want my character's life to be significantly threatened". Or more broadly, "I want my characters to achieve their goals" and "I want my characters to face obstacles that reduce their likelihood of success." There are lots of different potential ways to address that tension, with various tradeoffs.

[Vahnavoi]

Please describe to me the approach you take to dungeon delving, knowing that basilisks exist.

I already did. Again: use information gathering methods, such as divination spells, to check if there's a basilisk in the next destination, buy an amulet that protects from petrification, or use indirect fire or cover of darkness to fight it without entering its line-of-sight.

Notice the first step generalizes to all troublesome creatures. If I'm playing any old school dungeon crawling game, one of the priorities is getting some equivalent of Scroll of Detect Monsters & be watchful for any known troublesome creatures. In absence of such options, the most general strategy is to pay attention to specific context of the encounter (location, time of day, who was with it, etc.) to make guesses about where future troublesome creatures might be.


I don't really think "two different monsters" is overpopulation, but my point was just that if someone was taking the stance that "all basilisks should be signposted by the petrified bodies of former victims" (what about wandering ones though?), then there are other insta-death monsters which don't leave a distinctive calling card like that.

It's two different monsters so far, but you (or someone else) could repeat the same "what about this other monster?" until we're all sick of it. I'm telling to stop now because it doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter for the argument you're supposedly countering: if someone's of the opinion "instant death monsters should be signposted", then their answer to any "what about this monster that isn't signposted?" would presumably be "then add the signpost or don't use the monster". Nothing forces anyone to use any monster in a completely unpredictable manner.


I wouldn't say that insta-death monsters reduce delta per-se (after all, it's not like you couldn't already lose and die entirely via bad luck in most systems, insta-kill stuff just makes it more likely), I just don't think they're usually a benefit for the game.

Meanwhile, the point I'm making is that the benefit (or detriment) of any such monster depends on format of a game. They have different pay-offs as one-off elements than they have as repeat elements.

---


If one's philosophy is sufficiently simulationist/non-PCs-are-special, I don't think there's any inherent problem in some situations not having a solution and those situations not being the result of any obvious or predictable mistake.

While desire for simulation and ideas about character status might contribute, I don't think those are at the root of the matter. There's a far more basic game design question that could apply to a fully abstract game, such as a card solitaire. Namely:

Do I want to ensure that every permutation of my game is solvable?

It's worth noting that increasing hidden information and amount of randomness in a game both make it more difficult to ascertain that. For two popular card game examples, both Klondyke and Demon solitaire are notorious for having a lot of unwinnable hands and, more relevantly, it being extremely difficult to tell whether your hand is winnable until well into a game.

So, there's a point where the earlier question becomes equal to:

Do I want a game of imperfect information with genuine surprises in it?

and

"Can I deal with a game where, even if I play the best possible way, it still can't guarantee a victory?"

[Slipjig]

I don't agree that character death is what inherently makes things meaningful.

I mean, if we're talking AD&D, I was in an AD&D campaign where one of the players lost their character literally before they had a chance to do anything - rolled it up, joined our group, we had a random wilderness encounter, an enemy that won initiative one-shotted them.

AD&D was also a very different game, with very different expectations. But even in AD&D, that was some not-great DM-ing. Unless the players made some truly dumb decisions leading up to that, e.g. "The Magic-User will take point."

Death doesn't necessarily make things meaningful, but the absence of real risk cheapens the game overall. If everybody at the table knows that the DM has a "characters don't die unless the player agrees" rule or, even worse, the character CANNOT die unless they've already gone down X number of times (a la the 40k games or Candela Obscura), it's impossible to have any real tension in most combats. Sure, you can still have other stakes, but if the character isn't at risk, there's no opportunity for genuine heroism.

But you CAN create the tension even without risk of PC death, just by letting the players know that they CAN fail. And that you have a plan for what happens next in the campaign if they DO fail (and that they will enjoy it considerably less than the success path).

[Vahnavoi]

AD&D was also a very different game, with very different expectations. But even in AD&D, that was some not-great DM-ing. Unless the players made some truly dumb decisions leading up to that, e.g. "The Magic-User will take point."

What NichG described doesn't prove any pathological wrongdoing on their dungeon master's part - simply due to how die rolls are set up, literally every low-level character has some chance of dying before getting to do anything. This is likely true of every edition of D&D when played by the book, with more recent ones, it's just so unlikely that you'll never see it in practice.

[NichG]

AD&D was also a very different game, with very different expectations. But even in AD&D, that was some not-great DM-ing. Unless the players made some truly dumb decisions leading up to that, e.g. "The Magic-User will take point."

Death doesn't necessarily make things meaningful, but the absence of real risk cheapens the game overall. If everybody at the table knows that the DM has a "characters don't die unless the player agrees" rule or, even worse, the character CANNOT die unless they've already gone down X number of times (a la the 40k games or Candela Obscura), it's impossible to have any real tension in most combats. Sure, you can still have other stakes, but if the character isn't at risk, there's no opportunity for genuine heroism.

But you CAN create the tension even without risk of PC death, just by letting the players know that they CAN fail. And that you have a plan for what happens next in the campaign if they DO fail (and that they will enjoy it considerably less than the success path).

What I'm pushing back against here is the tendency to focus on 'delta' coming from things like combats, failures, etc. There's nothing wrong with having character death be a thing or failures be a thing, but its like spiciness (heat) in cooking - if your idea of how to make meals tasty was too strongly focused on 'what is the correct spice level to use?' you're really limiting yourself.

Without any failure, risk, death, combat, etc, you can still have lots of meaningful choices. The richest, most meaningful choices actually tend to occur outside of those sorts of conflicts, because 'what you want' is pretty clear once initiative has been rolled - mostly you want to kill the enemies, not die, and use as few permanent resources as possible. The consequence for screwing up is strong (e.g. it has an inherently very high saliency, like spicy food getting your attention), but outside of that its more one-note than other things.

Compare that with a choice like 'what do we do with this old castle we cleared out near the border town?'. Turn it into a base for the PCs? Okay, how would you like your base, what sorts of features do you want it to have, etc? Not just aesthetic - you'll be using those resources for the rest of the campaign perhaps. Turn it over to the local nobility in exchange for favors? Okay, interesting, which noble house in particular do you want to make stronger and more influential, and what kind of favors are you looking for? Just leave it sitting there abandoned? Okay, lets figure out what sorts of things might move back into it over the next year or two, that will probably have some consequences for the region. Break it down for raw materials and sell them? Okay, that takes some time and becomes a local endeavor, so this is what we're doing for the next few sessions - interactions with the local Masons' guild, Merchants' guild, finding buyers, finding ways to turn the new influx of wealth into stuff you actually want (and deciding what you actually want!), etc.

Those choices don't have the sting of losing progress when you make them 'wrong', but they can be very complex and have ongoing effects and can make lots of different things about the world matter. If combat and death is the spice in this metaphor, those sorts of 'what do we want?' choices are the umami, the aromatics, etc.

[Vahnavoi]

We could ditch the food analogy and more explicitly talk about different aspects of gameplay. It's possible to break down what makes a game "fun" to a player into several widely recognized aesthetic categories:

1) Sensory pleasure, which can be further broken down by sense: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell.

2) Self-expression: the ability of a player to bring up their own ideas and identity through medium of the game.

3) Discovery: learning and finding out new things.

4) Challenge: competition and testing of skill.

5) Narrative: building and experiencing a resonant story.

6) Social: enjoying company of and building up relationship with other players.

7) Submission: losing one's self to repetitive routine.

etc.

So there are at least this many dimensions of possible change when a player has their move.

True cosmetic changes are those that primarily affect sensory pleasure with a side of self-expression. A simple example would be having a choice between a couple of novelty chess sets or maybe painting the chess pieces yourself. The change does not move the game's state forward in any way.

For contrast, character elimination and consequent player elimination are traits of challenge-focused gameplay: the game state changing or threatening to change is a signal for the player to change what they're doing. As already noted, this ceases to work when the elimination results from something not of the player's doing (such as a random roll).

Earlier, Jay R lumped several changes in a game state as "cosmetic", when what they really are is narrative: even if you're locked into an immortal hero's journey, the question "what sort of a hero are you?" is obviously meaningful.

Meanwhile, NichG is largely pointing to a vast body of gameplay elements that can serve multiple aesthetics, challenge included, without there being a need for threat of elimination. Base building, or any building, is a great example: even if no-one gets eliminated for not building an impressive thing, the fact that some things are harder to build than others creates potential for test of skill and the observation that someone else might be building a more impressive thing than you creates potential for competition.

[kyoryu]

What I'm pushing back against here is the tendency to focus on 'delta' coming from things like combats, failures, etc. There's nothing wrong with having character death be a thing or failures be a thing, but its like spiciness (heat) in cooking - if your idea of how to make meals tasty was too strongly focused on 'what is the correct spice level to use?' you're really limiting yourself.

Without any failure, risk, death, combat, etc, you can still have lots of meaningful choices. The richest, most meaningful choices actually tend to occur outside of those sorts of conflicts, because 'what you want' is pretty clear once initiative has been rolled - mostly you want to kill the enemies, not die, and use as few permanent resources as possible. The consequence for screwing up is strong (e.g. it has an inherently very high saliency, like spicy food getting your attention), but outside of that its more one-note than other things.

Compare that with a choice like 'what do we do with this old castle we cleared out near the border town?'. Turn it into a base for the PCs? Okay, how would you like your base, what sorts of features do you want it to have, etc? Not just aesthetic - you'll be using those resources for the rest of the campaign perhaps. Turn it over to the local nobility in exchange for favors? Okay, interesting, which noble house in particular do you want to make stronger and more influential, and what kind of favors are you looking for? Just leave it sitting there abandoned? Okay, lets figure out what sorts of things might move back into it over the next year or two, that will probably have some consequences for the region. Break it down for raw materials and sell them? Okay, that takes some time and becomes a local endeavor, so this is what we're doing for the next few sessions - interactions with the local Masons' guild, Merchants' guild, finding buyers, finding ways to turn the new influx of wealth into stuff you actually want (and deciding what you actually want!), etc.

Those choices don't have the sting of losing progress when you make them 'wrong', but they can be very complex and have ongoing effects and can make lots of different things about the world matter. If combat and death is the spice in this metaphor, those sorts of 'what do we want?' choices are the umami, the aromatics, etc.

I agree that there are lots of interesting choices outside of failure that need to be leaned on, but I'd like to point out that there's lots of interesting failures that can happen that don't need to involve death or even "loss of progress", but can instead look more like the "fork in the road" decisions you're talking about, with the only real difference being that one of the possible outcomes is more preferred.

In fact, that's my general way that I run almost any kind of scene. I've referred to this as basically whether you're using a "gated challenge" type structure, or a "fork in the road" structure. I vastly prefer the fork-in-the-road. It's less "you lost" and more "you didn't get what you wanted".

[gbaji]

I don't know that high lethality is bad for Delta V (getting beyond the "failure doesn't have to mean death" discussion). What's important is that failure/death be, at some level, the result of decisions made, and preferably the result of multiple decisions made.

If you make a decision to charge a group of enemies by yourself, get beat up, refuse to retreat, and finally get killed? I find that perfectly in line with Delta V. If you're walking along in "cut scene time", there's an ambush that you had no ability to avoid, you roll for surprise and lose, the enemy takes their shot and kills you, that absolutely screws with Delta V. There's a result there that was not really a result of any decision you made.

Pretty much exactly this. I have a general rule as a GM that I will not kill a PC as a result of a random die roll that the PC could not avoid taking in the first place. Note, howevever, that this doesn't necessarily mean that at the moment, they could choose a different action/rolll (though sometimes it can!), but that the condtions in which there will ever be a die roll that may result in a character death (or, well, any significantly negative impact to a character) will only occur as a result of a series of previously made decisions by the players collectively, if not that player specifically.

You have to have made the decision to put your character into the risky situation in the first place, knowing at least in general what those risks were, and typically having the opportunity to use time and skills to gain even more info about said risks, to get into the situation in the first place. That's also not to say that a monumentally poor series of die rolls might not also land your character into a dead state, but that's extremely rare to even come up without some decisions going on ahead of time. I just tend to prefer to allow the players to have significant agency in terms of the risk they take with their characters. Of course, since they're typically playing in scenarios where there are risks that must be taken to obtain some reward or outcome that they desire, that's kinda part of the game. But the players know this going into it, and make those decisions themselves.


The time I died when I got mobbed by Goblins and stabbed to death in session 1? Just annoying that I bothered to put anytime in making a character beyond the numbers in the first place. The time I made a character and got killed on my first die roll of a d6 Star Wars game, just annoying. Dying in a long running campaign thanks to a "Save or Die" in the middle of the campaign, just annoying as I was the only one going through "new player" mode in a well-established group. In those situations, I learned to not care about my character as they were just an expendable game token, no more, no less. Who cares if I walk face first into a death trap? No one. If I LeRoy Jenkins a dragon by myself? No one. Just make a new token! Boring.

That's kind of the trick though, isn't it? Death (or equivalent) has to be enough of a risk for the character to care to try to avoid it. But death cannot be such a high risk that it feels inevitable, so there's no point in caring either. Either extreme leads to players who just don't care about the actions and outcomes of their characters.

The trick is finding the correct balance between those two IMO.


On the broader topic of decisions and outcomes though, my opinion is that you do want the PC choices to matter. But it's kinda like the death thing. If the PC choices have too much effect on the outcome, then they lose meaning. If me deciding "I want to do X" results in the GM creating the conditions for X to occur, obtaining X outcome doesn't feel very satisfying. On the flip side, if all paths lead to X, that's not so great either. There are a number of ways to manage this. My personal method is to not "force outcome X", but merely present X as "an outcome that may occur". And yes, sometimes this is a bit contrived. If I've written a scenario, with a bbeg who is doing something evil, and the method to defeat said bbeg is to figure out what he's doing, then find the <whatever> needed to stop him, which in turn requires going to <various places> to obtain that, then going to <some other place> to defeate said bbeg's plot, then those things are somewhat set. But the "how" is not. Where they go to get the info to figure things out may vary wildly (and I"m absolutely not above PC cleverness and out of the box thiinking playing hugely into this). How they go about getting to various locations to get <whatever it is they need> may also vary (and ofen the order, or even the specific destinations may vary as well, depending on the specifics). And, of course, the PCs are free to choose other things along the way, go off on tangents, etc.

My rule on this is "what are the players interested in?". If the players are enjoying the adventure, and happily moving along, then I'll just keep putting clues in, and letting them follow them to "X". If they decide they want to do something else for a while, then they can go do that. But the bbeg, and the "X" doesn't disappear just because of that. The point is that where and when they engage in the "main plot" (for lack of a better term) is 100% up to them. And honestly, I pretty much never even have any issues with this. It's pretty rare for players to go "well, we ran into some clues about this evil plot going on, and we have some information that we can follow up on if we want, but hey... let's just ignore that and go roaming around the countryside randomly looking for stuff instead". Not for more than minor diviersions that is. But that's part of the worldbuilding as well. I pretty much always put in some other things that may be going on in the same time/location that they are in. Usually minor things, generally not leading to anything major. But there, nonetheless. So if they find themselves in <some city> tracking down someone they need to interact with in some way for the adventure they're on, there will often be other things going on as well in that city. Some may just be random type encounters. Some may be small mini adventures.

The point is that they get to chart their course though the stuff I've placed in the world around them. And yes, I'll create content (on the fly sometimes even!), but usually only as a result of character actions. If they choose to do something, there will be responses from the world and the elements within it, to those actions. And sometimes, this may lead them into some interesting situations. But I tend to not go too far with that. As I said above, I don't put things in because a player wants it. A player can certainly express a desire to achieve some outcome, but if they want it, they need to come to me with the actions their character is doing that lead to that outcome. I'm not just going to drop it in front of them.


I guess the interesting question here is where the distinction between "actual delta in outcomes" and "percieved delta in actions" is, and which is actually more important. To me, at the end of the day, one of the primary objectives as a GM is to create an enjoyable game for the players. Too much "gimme", and they wont enjoy it. Too much "gotcha", and they wont either. I find that if you can find the right balance of "I'm going to put things into the world" and "you get to decide what to do with/about those things", the players tend to enjoy that a lot. And yeah, not surprisingly, a lot of the time that is about writing a pretty straightfoward adventure, with a relatively concrete set of "steps/chapters" within it, that the PCs are generally going to mostly just follow along. But as long as there are enough interesting bits in there, and details, and choices along the way that affect how other things play out (even if they may actually be somewhat ornamental in the grand scheme of things), that's plenty of "we have choices and they matter" for most players.

Also helps that I often get ideas for scenarios based on those "side choices/actions" PCs made along the way in some past adventure. Heck. I'd say that somewhere around 50% or more of my adventure ideas are created by looking at "loose ends" from some previous action or event that the PCs were involved in at some point in the past.

[KorvinStarmast]

It's two different monsters so far, but you (or someone else) could repeat the same "what about this other monster?" until we're all sick of it. I'm telling to stop now because it doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter for the argument you're supposedly countering: if someone's of the opinion "instant death monsters should be signposted", then their answer to any "what about this monster that isn't signposted?" would presumably be "then add the signpost or don't use the monster". Nothing forces anyone to use any monster in a completely unpredictable manner. Speaking of "insta death monsters" The Butcher in Original Diablo was a great example. (I ended up with 3 different ways of dealing with him, and then stumbled on a fourth).

[MoiMagnus]

That's kind of the trick though, isn't it? Death (or equivalent) has to be enough of a risk for the character to care to try to avoid it. But death cannot be such a high risk that it feels inevitable, so there's no point in caring either. Either extreme leads to players who just don't care about the actions and outcomes of their characters.

The trick is finding the correct balance between those two IMO.

And because of randomness, the balance is actually quite hard to reach, because some players will be unlucky.

Among the D&D players, is it acceptable that 10% of them have a sequence of bad luck and stop caring about their character after multiple pointless deaths in a row? And 1%? What is the % of players you are ready to sacrifice on the altar for the other players to feel like there was a risk in first place?

Admittedly, if you always play with the same group of friend, the GM can actually fix this by toning up or down the mortality of your games on-the-fly, depending on what the players want and depending on what happened previously (taking feedback from your players about "did that death feel fair/ok?" or "did the enemies feel threatening/dangerous?").

But I fully understand why D&D game designers progressively pushed the game toward being less and less deadly, especially at low level.

[Vahnavoi]

@MoiMagnus: humans demonstrably care about, even get addicted to, games of chance where they have less than 50% chance of victory. So your argument for why chance of death has been lowered in later editions of D&D is incomplete at best, and fallacious at worst. There isn't such a straightforward relationship between frequency of loss and how much a player cares about their participation in a game.

The actual reason chance of death has been lowered, is more likely that later developers (and players) idealize the concept of taking the same character through an entire campaign, and that is impossible if random death is too common. They may presume that players remain more invested this way but, again, the relationship is not so straightforward that this ought to be taken for granted.

[gbaji]

And because of randomness, the balance is actually quite hard to reach, because some players will be unlucky.

Among the D&D players, is it acceptable that 10% of them have a sequence of bad luck and stop caring about their character after multiple pointless deaths in a row? And 1%? What is the % of players you are ready to sacrifice on the altar for the other players to feel like there was a risk in first place?

I think those aren't necessarily connected though. Especially the "mulltiple pointless deaths" bit. If you are following the rules I laid out, there should never be *any* "pointless deaths".

If you find that your players (or some of them) are upset at multiple pointless deaths, the correct answer isn't to sacrifice the enjoyment of the rest of the players by putting the equivalent of fluffy child protection systems in place, but to change the nature of the things you are putting in your scenarios which are leading to these deaths. Characters should only be in a position where die roles may result in their deaths, if they have previously made a decision that put themselves in that position, presumably because they judged the objectives they are trying to achieve to be "worth the risk". That can (should) never make that death pointless. If they are fighting the invading monsters terrorizing the local village, and one of their members dies heroically because they choose to run off to engage some of the monsters who were about to chow down on one of the village children, then that death absolutely wasn't pointless.

If, on the other hand, the same character is walking along, and is hit by a poisoned assassins dart out of the blue, fails their save, and dies? That's pointless. If they are exploring some random corridor, fall into a spike trap, and die? That is pointless (you may get the pattern here and why I'm not a huge fan of "make a roll or die" style traps/attacks). Change your adventures to have more of the former type of "these are situations where my character may die", and fewer (maybe even "none") of the latter.

It's actually not that hard at all to tailor adventures to this rule. And, it actually usually makes a lot more sense from a realistic point of view (seriously, stop and think about what kind of traps or defenses you'd realistically want to have inside your own home or work area). Unfortunately, D&D has a long long history of "save or die" mechanics, and it can be tough to fight against the trend. But once you reject stuff like that, you'll find that your games not only run better, and your adventures make more thematic sense, but your players will enjoy them a heck of a lot more.



But I fully understand why D&D game designers progressively pushed the game toward being less and less deadly, especially at low level.

Yeah. Unfortunately, in many cases, instead of just tossing the "save or <something bad>" mechanic, often they just fluffify the <something bad> instead.

I'm saying "don't do that at all". That's not to say you can't have poisons, and can't say "poisons do <some damage/stat effect> rather than death" (that's actually a very good modification to the rules). And it's not to say that you can't have powerful spell effects that may incapacitate characters from time to time (but not kill them). But those things should be side events to the "main conflict/resolution" process. Give the PCs goals/objectives, and then obstacles to overcome to achieve them. Make overcoming those obstacles include reasonable risks. But maybe try to make those risks a bit more granular in nature. Combat is a great example of this, since it's often quite rare that someone just straight up dies in one round in combat (can happen, but usually does not).

It's really surprising how often this comes up when talking about D&D, given the HP inflation methodology of that game, and the more or less "resource depletion" nature of encounters. Deaths to characters in D&D should very very rarely occur except in a case where they're in a long tough fight, low on HPs, low on spells/abilities, and the PCs make the decision to "keep on pushing" to win. And, unless the combat and resolution thereoff is also pointless (which maybe says something about the scenario design), if a death occurs in that situation, it should be highly heroic, and not at all pointless.

And just to loop back to the point I made earlier about "give the PC goals/objectives". That's critically important. I've found (after decades of GMing) that players vastly prefer to be the ones "driving the plot", rather than the other way around. Adventures just plain work better if it's the PCs who learn about the evil plot/scheme/monsters/whatever that are about, and they decide on a course of action to deal with them, than if they are simply on the receiving end of attacks from said evil things. The former method puts the PCs "in the know" about the opponents, and often their greatest defense is that said evil things don't actually know (yet) who they are. They are on the offensive. They are the ones raiding the bbegs minion's locations. They're the ones finding journals, business records, shipping manifests, or whatever that leads them to the next stage of the adventure. They're the ones who are "surprising" the bad guys (most of the time).

When adventures are run the other way around, and it's the bad guys on the offensive (targeting the PCs), and the PCs on the defensive, that's when it can actually be very very hard to rationalize why the bad guys aren't using any of a host of incredibly simple and deadly things against the PCs. And this is what can lead to the players possibly feeling their deaths were pointless. So... always make your adventures such that, baring epic failure on their part, the directionality of the adventure and most encounters is the other way around. Not only will that dramatically decrease the death rate of the PCs, but it will *also* make the players feel like they are more actively driving the adventure rather than the other way around. It's their choices that lead to most encounters. They choose the when/where. They will be massively more engaged in the story/plot and events occuring around them if you make that actually be how they succeed. If they are merely passively waiting for the GM to attack them with monsters, then they wont have that investment, and are much more likely to feel that any deaths that do occure are actually pointless.


Oh. Funny followup to a point I made earlier in the thread, about my players and how they will pretty much always choose to follow threads I lay in front of them. I'm currently the running GM in our campaign. I told the other main GM that I was going to run a shortish "local adventure" (one character each), and then would run a longer/tougher adventure (two each). I had an idea for the short one, and was basically percolating ideas for the longer one. But, while writing the short one, there were basically two threats they had to deal with (all revolving around a single small town in the kingdom they were in). One threat was pretty much a basic "band of bandits in the hills". The other was a more mysterious threat that a local knight fell to. The party clues into this when tracking down the missing knight (who was investigating the bandits, but they rapidly discover he also started tracking down a series of mysterious disappearances that had been going on, quietly, for a decade or so). Turned out it was a pack of ghouls, stealing corpses from the graveyard nearby, and occasionally snacking on indigent folks (and sometimes making more ghouls). Great. They deal with that. But, of course, nothing is so straight. In our game, there are actual just normal "ghouls" in the game, but "ghoul" is also a term used to apply to human servants of vampire, who have been granted blood boons (yeah, got that term from V:tM, right). Said ghouls are just like normal folks, enhanced a bit, and with extended life, as long as their vampire master regularly provides them with blood. If not... they will eventually devolve into something more like the standard ghouls (including the ability to turn victims into actual normal ghouls as well).

As it turns out, like 20-25 years back, I ran a vampire adventure (out of the same small town, which none of the players actually remembered specifically). Said vampire was part of a larger plot going on at the time, and had kinda struck out on his own after some other even earlier events. Part of his plot was a terrible stereotype. He falls in love with one of the PCs, and is seducing her, under the guise of a friendly gem merchant. Players eventually figure out what's going on, have to rush to find his lair (he has a small cave complex in the nearby hills where he does his evil stuff, cause he like entertains guests in his actual manor home in town), and save her before he can turn her into a vampire. He escapes, but not before stealing some rare alchemetical components related to some work he'd been asking the local alchemist to do for him (cause he was such a friend to everyone, right?). Lots more to the actual scenario, but he had a foot/doorman and a butler. And no one ever found out what happened to them... Well, they were abandoned when their master had to leave suddenly, and now they're reduced to hiding in the secret basement under the old manor house, and have developed over time a need to feed on sentient flesh. And have built up a small group of ghouls, and are "awating the return of our master". And yeah, it really ratched up the paranoia of the group when they entered the basement (from a tunnel that had been dug to one of the crypts in the graveyard), and while in the middle of the fight notice a "really ornate coffin" in the one clean area of the room.

Here's where it gets really relevant. When they first defeated this vampire, they found a bookcase in his lair with a bunch of journals. From them, they learned how/why he and his vampire friends had arrived in the area in the first place, and what they were doing (which tied into a larger plot going on). And it contained some broad info about what he was doing specifically (and why he was interested in the alchemetical stuff). But the latest journal was missing. They assumed he took it with him or something. Well, in the basement with the ghouls, in addition to boxes of decently valuable gems, and some spell books, was... the last journal. With the stuff he was doing/planning right when they first encountered him. So yeah. I seriously did no prompting at all. They were immediately like "Ok. We're assembling a group and figuring out where he went and going after him!".

So. Now, that's the thrust of the longer adventure. I'll certainly pull a few elements from other things I had planned, but it'll be "figure out what the vampire was planning, follow his tracks, and take him down". I had a different adventure they could have gone on, but this is where they want to go, so that's what I'm going to run for them. So... loose end from one adventure (20+ years old!) turns into adventure today. And they could certainly have said "well, that's interesting info, and we'll maybe follow up on it someday, but... what adventure do you have for us now?", and I would have just run another adventure idea I had instead. Fortunately for them, vampire (well, ones that live a long time) tend to make long range plans, and take their time setting things up, so the journal will be useful to them. At least to a point (can't make things too easy on them, can I?).

I guess what I'm illustrating is that you absolutely can run somewhat linear individual adventures, but in a more free flowing open campaign. Just let your players decide what clues they follow up on, and how they go about it. Doesn't mean I'm not going to plop something right in front of them, if they're not actively doing something else (which was what I was planning to do initially anyway), but I've also found that by picking up old plot lines, or re-awakening past events and making them relevant, the players will practically leap into action (at least that's how my table works). I'm rarely sitting there with a table full of players looking at me, waiting for me to tell them what happens next. I set the wheels in motion, and then let them drive the cart.

[kyoryu]

But I fully understand why D&D game designers progressively pushed the game toward being less and less deadly, especially at low level.

I think it was just two things, really.

1. The switch to presuming a single character vs a stable of characters.
2. The addition of long-term story, and the difficulties that presented with narrative continuity.

And, really, I think it's mostly the first, though that was probably prompted by the second.

[Saintheart]

If you want rolling the dice to be meaningful, i.e. have a potential impact on the outcome, then you have to be able to win or lose by luck. Saying you shouldn't ever lose because of bad luck is equivalent to saying you should never win by luck and also that you shouldn't have luck at all, at which point you're better off playing chess. Basically if you include meaningful dice, you're making the meaningful choice to win or lose randomly.

Lots of good thoughts here that honestly I haven't read through thoroughly, but this seems like a good entry point, especially from some of the immediately preceding posts which basically come down to: 'you can more readily handle character death if your chose to do so'.

The above quote I think is really important, but I'm going to start by disagreeing with it: I don't think dice are part of the game in order to make the game meaningful. The dice are there to represent (I won't say simulate) an element of reality that hits certain sections of our meaning-seeking brains.

Dice, and I admit on this one I've been persuaded by the Angry GM's blogs on it, are present in a RPG to represent cruel reality that doesn't care about your dreams, intentions, etc. Assuming a fair dice, there is a remorseless chance of your stated intent going wrong when it's applied to reality. Under D&D, in combat contexts especially, this becomes an all-but-guaranteed chance of things going wrong in the natural 1. The stripped-down, repeating 'core program' of a RPG in progress is:
1) DM describes situation
2) Asks what characters do
3) Players specify what their characters do, or attempt to do
4) DM adjudicates the results of that attempt.

Step (4) is the only point at which dice come into the picture, and only then if the DM feels a dice roll is called for because the outcome is not certain. If you knew the player would fail, as a DM, you'd tell them so, and if you knew what they wanted to do would succeed, as a DM, you wouldn't call for the roll.

The dice give reality's opacity, cruel objectivity, and uncertainty their say on our intentions. A say that can't really be argued with. A say that might result in our deaths depending on the context. Reality is arbitrary if not capricious and it's often unfair (at least as we perceive fairness). Or at the very least there are thousands of elements operating on our day-to-day existence that we can't account for or calculate for or prepare for. Our life in the world is struggle against the arbitrariness and opacity of reality. In a RPG, that struggle is symbolically represented by the pluses and minuses to our stats. The modifiers allow us to kid ourselves - in a good and sane way, just as we do in our normal lives - that our actions have some sort of influence on reality even if they can't necessarily affect the outcome. That's also why the natural 1 and the natural 20 are in place -- they also remind us that, no matter how big our modifier is, things can go unexpectedly south on us, and there's nothing our accumulated experience or intellect can do about it.

The dice in my view don't represent meaningful choice. The main reason for their existence is to sow the RPG experience with a 'cue' that helps us convince ourselves it's more real than it first appears to be. Remove the dice, and as said you've either got a zero-sum, fixed-outcome game like chess, or you have freeform RPGing, which is much more about wish fulfilment and (not coincidentally) often has big problems resolving things like fights. Or you have a 'god game' RPG like Microscope where the experience being simulated is the construction of a narrative, not a representation of reality as a RPG tries to be.

That said, there is some truth that having dice means you're making a choice to win or lose by luck. My experience tends to be that losing by luck is a little more tolerable if some choice was involved into getting into the losing situation. Like that failed Str check mentioned above, or where the party is warned that X course is dangerous and they choose to take the odds. I've even experimented with quietly taking a player aside when his HP hits -10 (before advising publicly) and asking whether he wants to continue the character or not. This doesn't duplicate reality, but then, a RPG isn't meant to duplicate reality any more than a painting or a novel produces an exact facsimile of a moment or moments in time. They are all there to induce an emotional response, an emotional kick, and teach us in some small, imperfect way, about how to better handle our lives.

[Herbert_W]

If you want rolling the dice to be meaningful, i.e. have a potential impact on the outcome, then you have to be able to win or lose by luck. Saying you shouldn't ever lose because of bad luck is equivalent to saying you should never win by luck and also that you shouldn't have luck at all, at which point you're better off playing chess. Basically if you include meaningful dice, you're making the meaningful choice to win or lose randomly.

There's a hidden assumption here that I'd like to call into question: being able to win or loose by luck is not the same thing as always being able to win or loose by luck.

Success or failure aren't binary states. There's a sliding scale:

Win, which usually means dead enemies, loot, and XP.
Draw, which could be you escaping from your enemies or vice versa.
Loose, meaning story failure, loss of items, level drain, or character death.

Each of these points can be expanded into a finer scale based on resource expenditure. There's some weeds that we could get lost in here. You could make the scale even finer by further subdivision (how easily can the lost resources be recovered?) or acknowledging incomparibles (save an NPC vs. gain a better sword).

For simplicity, let's just suppose that you have a resource budget for the day/adventure/arc/whatever and each encounter could put you (1) over, (2) on, or (3) under that budget.

Multiplying this out, you have nine meaningfully distinct points on the scale of success. Again, there's weeds that you could get lost in here. I'm not saying that there's exactly nine meaningfully distinct points, just that there's a bunch of 'em.

So, what moves you up or down this scale? Well, there's:

Player choices
DM choices
Luck

You might think of these as being like a pie chart. The more significant any one is, the less significant the other two can be.

For a game to respect player agency, luck and the DM should both have a small enough role in deciding outcomes to allow room for choice to mater. We already know that railroading is widely considered to be bad: a DM who seizes 100% control over outcomes takes away the players' feeling of agency. (This applies whether the DM railroads to success or failure. The latter may be more frustrating, but the former is still unsatisfying.) Granting luck the same overwhelming power over outcomes would create the same problem for the same reason.

Yet, as others have pointed out, at least one of these needs to have a large enough influence to be felt for a game to feel like a real world with real challenges.

This creates a tradeoff. Luck (and equally DM guidance, but we're primarily talking about luck here) having too much or too little influence both cause problems. There's a happy medium somewhere in between these extremes. The optimal point will vary based on player preference and the genre of game, but it's there.

If we make a binary choice between extremes, both options suck. We want to find the happy medium.

[Zombimode]

If we make a binary choice between extremes, both options suck. We want to find the happy medium.

Hm... I'm not sure if there is room for something else. Any event that has a non-zero chance of not happening happens "by luck" if it happens.

[kyoryu]

So, what moves you up or down this scale? Well, there's:

Player choices
DM choices
Luck

You might think of these as being like a pie chart. The more significant any one is, the less significant the other two can be.

For a game to respect player agency, luck and the DM should both have a small enough role in deciding outcomes to allow room for choice to mater. We already know that railroading is widely considered to be bad: a DM who seizes 100% control over outcomes takes away the players' feeling of agency. (This applies whether the DM railroads to success or failure. The latter may be more frustrating, but the former is still unsatisfying.) Granting luck the same overwhelming power over outcomes would create the same problem for the same reason.


I think this is a good way of looking at it.

As a quick model, I'd probably assign in a given situation a number 1-10 for each category, 1 being the worse. You can then think of what's the minimum number you need to win/lose/draw. Arguably, if you play perfectly, luck shouldn't be able to make you do worse than "draw".

It's also worth noting that even thinking of it like this kind of implies a singular event, whereas really it should be multiple events, each pushing the world state forward. In other words, a "final result" shouldn't really be the result of a single element, so worse failures should be the result of continually having a combination of poor choices/luck, and continuing to press on anyway.

I'd add in there that severity of the loss is a factor to analyze as well - if you burn resources on a fight, but walk away? You've lost in some sense. If you withdraw, and that means something happens in the world that you don't like? THat's also a loss. Less severe losses can be more up to randomness/GM decisions. Truly catastrophic ones should require a significant error or set of errors on the part of the player.

[NichG]

This is why my current design heartbreaker is coming up with a system where all rolls only exist to determine costs, and never themselves determine success or failure even of a single one-off action. The most elegant design I have is also sort of psychologically reversed compared to what decades of TTRPGs have established: when you initiate a course of action, the difficulty of what you're trying to do determines the number of dice you roll, your skill determines the threshold for 'complications', and you have to buy off complications with resources (or accept their consequences) in order to complete the course of action you initiated. But this means that the more dice you roll, the worse the situation is - so it's fighting against 'it feels good to roll a big handful of dice'. The alternatives I've come up with involve too much table-side math or manipulation of dice sets...

[Darth Credence]

Luck can be eliminated quite easily, I think. Rather than rolling dice, everyone gets a deck for each dice type, with one card for each number. Whenever you need to roll the dice, select from the deck what number you want to roll. You use every card in the deck before you can start over with using other cards.

That gives everyone a choice about everything they do. If you end up failing a save and dying because you were down to just the cards below 5, well, you had a lot of opportunities to save up a high card for such an occasion. There is no need to carefully plan things to ensure that luck can never cause someone to lose because bad rolls are now the sum of a bunch of choices.

I have had some groups playing games love this in place of dice (never tried in a TTRPG, just various board games), and I have had others hate it. Those who liked it liked it for the strategy because knowing when to play off the bad cards was a hugely important skill. Those who hated it hated the idea that they couldn't get a lucky streak going. I would imagine that in a TTRPG, this would be beneficial to players, especially if you also let everyone know what the DCs are for challenges, or what AC needs to be hit, since that would allow the players to use the lowest possible card that passes.

[Vahnavoi]

@Darth Credence: you deserve a round of applause for explaining that card-based ruleset. Your observation also neatly demonstrates how it is a straightforward trade-off between different game aesthetics - you can eliminate gambling on chance rather trivially, but then you have to face the fact that some people like to gamble.

[Mordar]

You know what. I won't convince anyone else of my position that death doesn't matter in RPGs, and that is fine. The way I think about games and many people on this forum think about them is different. That is why I learn a lot about RPGs by reading these different takes and thoughts. Thank you all for sharing.

I will say that from my perspective the only "Meaningful" decision in an RPG game is when you decide to play and when you decide not to play. The rest doesn't matter. By playing you are embarking on a collaborative experience, and there is no winning or losing, there is only experiencing. The playing was either worth your time or it was not, and you often do not know which until it is all over.

The Play is the thing.

I very much expected this would be a take from you based on exactly one thing: I know you paint and play miniature wargames. I know I have reduced you to that one characteristic in my mind, and hope that it isn't taken as a negative, because I believe you are a fully realized person, but the two things I know about you are (a) you post on the GitP Forum, and (b) you post about miniature games. I think your commentary above is reflective of participation in a hobby where you (we!) spend hours and hours on game-hobby activities that aren't the actual game. Collecting, assembling, painting...all of those are such huge drivers of my enjoyment of miniature wargames that the outcome on the table when it is actually time to play is so tertiary that losing can be more fun than winning. It doesn't mean you don't try to win...just that it isn't a primary or secondary driver.


I agree that it's not inherently bad for some goals to prove unexpectedly unachievable, even by design. Seeing how characters cope with something like that can be interesting. I guess that the main question there is how often feels like "too much": At what point does it seem like our heroes should really just pick a new career?

Oh, and beware railroading, of course. Just like a GM shouldn't commit to a problem having exactly one solution, a GM shouldn't commit to a problem having exactly zero solutions. If the players find a way to do the "impossible", reward their ingenuity.

Potential results can significantly differ from each other in ways that don't make one clearly and straightforwardly "better" or "worse" than another, and that's often more interesting than degrees of clear-cut "success" or "failure".

Can you provide a couple examples for context? Do you mean situations were, for instance, a "villain" plot isn't foiled...but the consequences of that plot end up spawning branching stories that actually lead to a more immersive narrative? A filler adventure at 3rd level that ends up defining the entirety of the campaign, and a throw-away adversary becomes the nemesis? Or something more like a butterfly flaps its wings...?

[ASIDE: Railroads in what I believe to be the generally used sense can spawn great game experiences (where some choice is surrendered as part of a social contract, formal or otherwise). Railroads where there are legitimately no choices, or one and exactly one way to follow the one and exactly one path that can lead to success, on the other hand...well, I played a lot of 80s era video games too...]


I don't, and I'm sure I'm not alone. And I doubt that winning is of primary importance to a majority of gamers.

I use (and read) the question of "care" to imply more than just winning or losing. More of a "Do you play those sorts of games with the intent to win?" versus "Do you get all pouty/tantrummy/upset if you don't win?" Do you cleave to the rules and intent of the game, or do you just actively quarter-ass it to be above all of that "competition and meaning" sort of thing? I don't mean Devils_Advocate you, I mean general you.


But choices are only meaningful insofar as the variance in consequences is meaningful, not just to the extent that that variance exists. And the more regularly that player characters die, the more that players are discouraged from putting any actual, y'know, characterization into them (because it's not worth the effort to write up a detailed backstory nor personality for a character who's only going to last a few hours), instead of churning out a stream of nameless, faceless store brand adventurers whose only notable motive is the acquisition of wealth (as the default motivation for going into monster-infested dungeons is "that's where the treasure is").

Having to play Generic Fighter #378947 instead of Generic Fighter #378946 hardly seems like a terribly meaningful consequence.

[SNIP]

There's a certain tension between "I don't want my character to die" and "I want my character's life to be significantly threatened". Or more broadly, "I want my characters to achieve their goals" and "I want my characters to face obstacles that reduce their likelihood of success." There are lots of different potential ways to address that tension, with various tradeoffs.

I support the idea of balance between those tensions, investment in the game, and the potential for the most dire of consequences. I believe the game remains a game, even with all of the narrative and social values and components. I think RPGs benefit from a tutorial space like many video games...where you learn the system (but in RPGs, also the character?) in a safe zone for a little while, and then the game risk elevates. I believe in a mature, long run game there can be significant fail states beyond death, but I believe death should always be on the table, if you will. And I think death usually should have real world consequence (like time lost playing, as much as that sucks).


@MoiMagnus: humans demonstrably care about, even get addicted to, games of chance where they have less than 50% chance of victory. So your argument for why chance of death has been lowered in later editions of D&D is incomplete at best, and fallacious at worst. There isn't such a straightforward relationship between frequency of loss and how much a player cares about their participation in a game.

The actual reason chance of death has been lowered, is more likely that later developers (and players) idealize the concept of taking the same character through an entire campaign, and that is impossible if random death is too common. They may presume that players remain more invested this way but, again, the relationship is not so straightforward that this ought to be taken for granted.


I think it was just two things, really.

1. The switch to presuming a single character vs a stable of characters.
2. The addition of long-term story, and the difficulties that presented with narrative continuity.

And, really, I think it's mostly the first, though that was probably prompted by the second.

I'm not sure if I agree. Been playing since AD&D (early 80s), and already by that point the groups I played in didn't use rotating characters. There was a lot of churn, though, based on restarting groups - but all the same players making new characters, not some recycling previous iterations or maintaining a stable to draw from. The ideal of single character long run campaigns was pretty common by a few years into my play experience, and death wasn't viewed as "get another sheet from the folder". I really think the "respawn" expectation driven by video games (that don't take quarters and don't have limited lives) drives this more than a desire for single character long runs. Also a bit of maximum time on task being rewarding.


@Darth Credence: you deserve a round of applause for explaining that card-based ruleset. Your observation also neatly demonstrates how it is a straightforward trade-off between different game aesthetics - you can eliminate gambling on chance rather trivially, but then you have to face the fact that some people like to gamble.

I think that is a little reductionist - uncertainty has more attraction than just the gambling aspect. But here's my more interesting thought...does the card system increase the likelihood of death to "trash mobs" rather than failure/death in climactic scenes?

- M

[gbaji]

I have had some groups playing games love this in place of dice (never tried in a TTRPG, just various board games), and I have had others hate it. Those who liked it liked it for the strategy because knowing when to play off the bad cards was a hugely important skill. Those who hated it hated the idea that they couldn't get a lucky streak going. I would imagine that in a TTRPG, this would be beneficial to players, especially if you also let everyone know what the DCs are for challenges, or what AC needs to be hit, since that would allow the players to use the lowest possible card that passes.

Honestly, I would hate it, but not at all because it would prevent me from having a "lucky streak", but because it's too easily gamed (from any/all sides). Don't get me wrong, I'd abuse the heck out of it, but the whole time I'd be thinking "this isn't a great mechanic because I'm basically cheating here".

The problem with this approach, is that it is 100% deterministic based entirely on two things:

1. How much the player(s) know what their target number is.

2. How much the player(s) have the ability to manipulate the refresh of cards.


The first point is pretty straightforward, but relevant. If the players know the target number they need, they can always pick exactly the correct numbered card to succeed, or use the lowest number left if they decide it's not worth it to try. Which allows for perfect play. Only made difficult at all by the...

Second point, is problematic. Do the players have the opportunity to dump low cards as they wish, to maximize the use of high cards for the things they really want to succee at. And how much ability do they have? Can they sit there beteween each combat, spaming search attempts, use up their cards, then get a fresh set full of high carrds, own the combat, then spam again to get the high cards back? And if not, then how does the GM moderate this?

Which leads to a third problem. It only prevents "perfect play" if the GM actually contrives things to make it so. The result becomes extremely determinalistic. The GM can force an encounter knowing the PCs are low on high cards, or he can give them some fluff things to burn out their decks and give them fresh ones for the "big fight". It makes gaming the deck the key strategy, and both players are GMs are going to play that game, instead of the one they are actually playing.

It also goes back to player knowledge being an issue. Even if we assume folks aren't gaming, then we will have situations where a PC enters a conflict, knowing they have no high cards, and thus knowing there is nothing they can do for X rounds as a result. The dice literally have memory in this model, and it's not a good thing IMO.

I vastly prefer a situation where the player knows "I have an X% chance of doing <something>" in each attempt, and knowing that actually means that that's their odds of success. Every single attempt. In this model, if the player has the card needed, then it's a 100% chance. If he doesn't, then it's a 0% chance.

[kyoryu]

I'm not sure if I agree. Been playing since AD&D (early 80s), and already by that point the groups I played in didn't use rotating characters. There was a lot of churn, though, based on restarting groups - but all the same players making new characters, not some recycling previous iterations or maintaining a stable to draw from. The ideal of single character long run campaigns was pretty common by a few years into my play experience, and death wasn't viewed as "get another sheet from the folder". I really think the "respawn" expectation driven by video games (that don't take quarters and don't have limited lives) drives this more than a desire for single character long runs. Also a bit of maximum time on task being rewarding.


I think the shift was already in place by the early-mid 80s. Also a lot of people picking up the game as kids (myself included) never really did that anyway.

I didn't really undersatnd that style until I played in a game with the parents of one of my friends that had been running since the 70s, and it was eye-opening in a lot of ways.

But either way, experiencing that style showed me how it could really work, and how death would be perceived in that style. And there's plenty of historical evidence that that's exactly how Gary ran his games, and likely Greenwood as well as others - Undermountain/Waterdeep follow exactly the pattern of "a town built on a megadungeon, oh, and look at all the retired PCs that are now NPCs".

In that style, character death just... isn't a big deal. Once you presume a party stays together, having characters die creates a lot of problems with continuity, power, bringing characters in, etc.

If there's no "party", and it's just "whoever shows up", then a character being gone isn't a big deal, since there's no expectation. If there is a party and plot, then you've suddenly got a missing role and their narrative threads end.

If your character at level n dies, it's again not a big deal. You can either bring in one of your characters near that level, or the group can just play their lower level characters for some sessions. Since churn is a thing, they won't be permanently behind the rest of the party. In the "one party" game, you have to manage that - do they come in at level - 1 and be behind? Do they come in at level, making it feel like the death didn't matter? Do they (probably not) start at level 1?

Since there's no party, "why do we let in this rando and where do we meet them?" is unimportant. The mechanisms for "put together the party for the week" already exist, so the fact that an additional new character joins the pool (if they even do) doesn't matter. In the one party game, where they're wandering about, how do they meet them? Where do they meet them? Why do they decide to travel together?

A lot of problems with character death just don't exist in the open-table style of play, and become much bigger issues if you assume narrative and a stable party.

Also, to be clear, I'm not saying "everyone played like this". I am saying that that's how Gary and a lot of the other early influencers played, and that the game evolved around that style. And as the common style changed to consistent parties, some of the rules that made sense didn't work and needed to change.

[Herbert_W]

Hm... I'm not sure if there is room for something else. Any event that has a non-zero chance of not happening happens "by luck" if it happens.

Right, but what the "event" is that happens by luck can vary due to player choice. Here's an example of a situation where player choice and luck both matter:

Do you have a crappy plan? Luck makes the difference between death and a costly (in terms of spell slots etc.) escape.
Do you have an OK plan? Luck makes the difference between a costly escape and a costly success.
Do you have a good plan? Luck makes the difference between a costly success and pulling it off freely.



Arguably, if you play perfectly, luck shouldn't be able to make you do worse than "draw".

Bingo.

At least, bingo for DnD-like games. Being at risk of a fate worse than a draw even with perfect play might be perfectly suitable for horror games.

My own personal preference would be for a game where, with perfect (or just consistently good) play, players will often succeed and never do worse than barely escaping with their lives.


It's also worth noting that even thinking of it like this kind of implies a singular event, whereas really it should be multiple events, each pushing the world state forward.

Oh yes, there's a lot of complexity here that I'm skimming over.

Cumulative effects allow randomness to be felt on a moment-to-moment basis while reducing the overall impact of randomness on the final result. You can feel each high and low of a set of encounters with good or bad rolls, but overall your luck should average out. It's very very unlikely that one player will have consistently good or bad rolls over an entire campaign. Plus, players can change their strategy to compensate for or capitalize on the luck that they've had in the past more easily than they can on the fly in an encounter.

I did skim over that complexity for a reason, though: there's a lot of it. It'd be easy to get lost in the weeds.


Luck can be eliminated quite easily, I think. Rather than rolling dice, everyone gets a deck for each dice type, with one card for each number . . .

That's a clever system and you could get a very nice game out of it.

That game would be nothing like DnD. It'd be more strategic, more "gamey," and feel less like a living world with real challenges.

I think this is a good illustration of not just what you gain, but also what you loose, when you take randomness out of a game. DnD has dice because those dice work well for what DnD is trying to do.

[Vahnavoi]

But here's my more interesting thought...does the card system increase the likelihood of death to "trash mobs" rather than failure/death in climactic scenes?

- M

It can go either way depending on how rest of a game is set up. It is easy to set up a test - control for game scenario and all the other rules save for method number generation - but it's non-trivial to carry out and calculate the results.

To give some idea how and why: using cards, it's possible to create a game where you can't lose to a mob, yet can't win the boss. Simplified example: losing to the mob requires two 1s in a row. Beating the boss requires two 20s in row. Using cards, only being allowed to use each card once before a redraw, both sequences are impossible. Using independent die rolls, both sequences have 1-in-400 chance.

A different phenomenom emerges depending on which cards mobs have compared to players. If mobs have the same cards but only have one encounter (the players), this means mobs have incentive to play high cards. Compared to independent die rolls, this effectively means that mobs have higher numbers. This puts pressure on how players can ration their cards. This can lead to a situation where, using the same mobs and the same boss, the boss becomes impossible if players try to play perfect against mobs, compared to die rolls having a steady win %. To counter this, players may be forced to accept (bad) outcomes in mob fights that would only happen some % of time when using dice. The overall effect can be that players have overall 100% win rate strategy BUT it requires that one (or more) player(s) lose(s) their character in one of the fights - compared to a dice version where there is some % chance that everyone survives (even if it is very low).

[Darth Credence]

Honestly, I would hate it, but not at all because it would prevent me from having a "lucky streak", but because it's too easily gamed (from any/all sides). Don't get me wrong, I'd abuse the heck out of it, but the whole time I'd be thinking "this isn't a great mechanic because I'm basically cheating here".

The problem with this approach, is that it is 100% deterministic based entirely on two things:

1. How much the player(s) know what their target number is.

2. How much the player(s) have the ability to manipulate the refresh of cards.


The first point is pretty straightforward, but relevant. If the players know the target number they need, they can always pick exactly the correct numbered card to succeed, or use the lowest number left if they decide it's not worth it to try. Which allows for perfect play. Only made difficult at all by the...

Second point, is problematic. Do the players have the opportunity to dump low cards as they wish, to maximize the use of high cards for the things they really want to succee at. And how much ability do they have? Can they sit there beteween each combat, spaming search attempts, use up their cards, then get a fresh set full of high carrds, own the combat, then spam again to get the high cards back? And if not, then how does the GM moderate this?

Which leads to a third problem. It only prevents "perfect play" if the GM actually contrives things to make it so. The result becomes extremely determinalistic. The GM can force an encounter knowing the PCs are low on high cards, or he can give them some fluff things to burn out their decks and give them fresh ones for the "big fight". It makes gaming the deck the key strategy, and both players are GMs are going to play that game, instead of the one they are actually playing.

It also goes back to player knowledge being an issue. Even if we assume folks aren't gaming, then we will have situations where a PC enters a conflict, knowing they have no high cards, and thus knowing there is nothing they can do for X rounds as a result. The dice literally have memory in this model, and it's not a good thing IMO.

I vastly prefer a situation where the player knows "I have an X% chance of doing <something>" in each attempt, and knowing that actually means that that's their odds of success. Every single attempt. In this model, if the player has the card needed, then it's a 100% chance. If he doesn't, then it's a 0% chance.

I mentioned in my post how it would be beneficial to the players if they know what the DC and AC they are targeting is. If I were to use this in a TTRPG, I would not tell people the AC of anything, but I would definitely describe what they are wearing and how they move in an attempt to give an idea of roughly what the AC would be. I would not tell them exactly what the DC of something would be, but I would attempt to get across a general level of difficulty - something like, "The ground is firm, and the distance across the chasm is only a little bit longer than a standard jump, so you think you should be able to make it" for a low DC jump, vs "The chasm is wide enough that it would be the farthest jump you've ever made if you succeed, and the moisture in the cave has made the ground slick in places" for a high DC jump. And, yes, an obvious thing to do would be to use trivial things to blow through the low cards. But, if the DM takes the advice of many and only call for a roll if there is a possibility of failure that has a meaningful effect on the game, then they would still be making a choice to fail some things.

As I said, this was purely about showing how luck can be taken off the table. There are trade-offs. The people I played with that didn't like it gave their reason as not wanting to have no shot at a lucky streak - there are other possible reasons, of course, like your concern (although your concern and theirs are closer than you may think - wanting to always have that possibility, no matter how small, of getting the roll you need is not that different from wanting the possibility of a lucky streak). But I don't think it can be argued that it doesn't create a lot of meaningful choices in relation to the thread topic. Every roll becomes a meaningful choice - you are choosing what to get for that roll, knowing that this choice will further constrain future choices. If you go into a fight with nothing but low cards, you had to have used your high cards for something else before. You knew when you did that that it would mean that later on you would have the equivalent of low rolls, but you made a choice that it would be better to have the high results at that time and the low results later.


That's a clever system and you could get a very nice game out of it.

That game would be nothing like DnD. It'd be more strategic, more "gamey," and feel less like a living world with real challenges.

I think this is a good illustration of not just what you gain, but also what you loose, when you take randomness out of a game. DnD has dice because those dice work well for what DnD is trying to do.

I agree it would not be D&D. I have not used it on a TTRPG, just some board games that use dice. Gloomhaven is closer to this, with some cards selected and some drawn for randomness. For as much as I love that game, it definitely has more of a strategy game feel than an RPG.


It can go either way depending on how rest of a game is set up. It is easy to set up a test - control for game scenario and all the other rules save for method number generation - but it's non-trivial to carry out and calculate the results.

To give some idea how and why: using cards, it's possible to create a game where you can't lose to a mob, yet can't win the boss. Simplified example: losing to the mob requires two 1s in a row. Beating the boss requires two 20s in row. Using cards, only being allowed to use each card once before a redraw, both sequences are impossible. Using independent die rolls, both sequences have 1-in-400 chance.

A different phenomenom emerges depending on which cards mobs have compared to players. If mobs have the same cards but only have one encounter (the players), this means mobs have incentive to play high cards. Compared to independent die rolls, this effectively means that mobs have higher numbers. This puts pressure on how players can ration their cards. This can lead to a situation where, using the same mobs and the same boss, the boss becomes impossible if players try to play perfect against mobs, compared to die rolls having a steady win %. To counter this, players may be forced to accept (bad) outcomes in mob fights that would only happen some % of time when using dice. The overall effect can be that players have overall 100% win rate strategy BUT it requires that one (or more) player(s) lose(s) their character in one of the fights - compared to a dice version where there is some % chance that everyone survives (even if it is very low).

Well, two 20s in a row is still a technical possibility if someone arranges for it (two 1s, too, but I don't know why anyone would). Save the 20 for the last card, play it, pick up all the cards and play the 20 again. Unlikely, but possible.

If I were to use this for a TTRPG, as the DM I would shuffle my decks and play them in the order they come to get away from them always having the best numbers on hand. I would also make one deck for all of the NPCs and monsters, while the players would each get their own. This could possibly be a huge benefit to a DM, if players complain about the DM rolling well, or to make it a bit easier to get the results. The DM will always be rolling the flat distribution, and a card with a big number on it won't fall off the table or be difficult to read.

A few other things to mention about it. What to do about advantage/disadvantage being one - those make no sense in a method like this, or at least they just become a good place to burn the low cards. I think I'd replace it with a +/-3 bonus, but I don't know for sure. Or how about portents? is the way to go to pick out three cards for portents and set them aside like any other card being used? Does that make portents a place to dump low cards exclusively, since you can use them on enemies? Is that OP? I don't know.

Would introducing ways to get cards back early be a good idea? Like, say, martials can pick up one used card per short rest as a resource recovery or the like. I just don't know. It would take some significant work, I think, to actually implement this in a game and have it be balanced properly when you dig into the nitty gritty. But as a proof of concept that the game can be played without the randomness of the dice, it works to get the mind running that way and to think about what randomness means to the game, and how the game would function if it were greatly reduced. Maybe it would be better to shuffle the cards, rather than select them, so there is still some randomness but everyone will roll the flat distribution and it will pay to pay attention to what you have gotten recently. If I was running three or four games I'd experiment, but I'm only doing my main game at the moment and we are far too far in for that.

[NichG]

I've stayed away from the card-based thing because of the weirdness of 'intentionally burning cards' to trigger a refresh.

But a hybrid system could avoid it. Lets say you can refresh a hand of 7 cards once per something like a short rest. Whenever you are trying to do something that would require a roll, you can choose either to roll or substitute a card for your roll (if you have a card left). Whenever you are defending against something being proactively done to you and you alone (e.g. someone makes an attack roll against you) you can substitute one of your cards for their roll. A proactive card spent overrides a defensive card spent, so if they're spending a card on their roll you can't spend your low cards to replace it.

Rolls would be on a d10. Maybe remove Jacks, Queens, and Kings or have them be special effect sorts of things. Maybe the DM always rolls, or only top-end villains get card hands to work with, or the DM has 10 cards per session to spend or something like that.

[gbaji]

I mentioned in my post how it would be beneficial to the players if they know what the DC and AC they are targeting is. If I were to use this in a TTRPG, I would not tell people the AC of anything, but I would definitely describe what they are wearing and how they move in an attempt to give an idea of roughly what the AC would be. I would not tell them exactly what the DC of something would be, but I would attempt to get across a general level of difficulty - something like, "The ground is firm, and the distance across the chasm is only a little bit longer than a standard jump, so you think you should be able to make it" for a low DC jump, vs "The chasm is wide enough that it would be the farthest jump you've ever made if you succeed, and the moisture in the cave has made the ground slick in places" for a high DC jump. And, yes, an obvious thing to do would be to use trivial things to blow through the low cards. But, if the DM takes the advice of many and only call for a roll if there is a possibility of failure that has a meaningful effect on the game, then they would still be making a choice to fail some things.

Yeah. I get that approach too. Again though, the problem is that this becomes the game, rather than the one I'm playing. And to be honest, this somewhat as a side effect, ups the stakes for not playing this mini-game well. If I roll a die, and the GM says "you miss", I'm not super upset. Maybe I'll roll better next time. Or, if I did roll well, and still missed, maybe I should try something different. So it kinda has a natural feel to it as you get a sense of what your probabilities are.

Using a high(ish) card, but still missing (maybe just by one) would feel like a real blow. Because it actually cost you something more than just "I have X chance, and still have that same chance next round". You've hurt your capabilities going foward as a result of misplaying that card. I just feel like using cards for this would produce really "swingy" results. Either the players have a good handle on things, and are more or less batting out of the park, or things don't align, and the find themselves overplaying high cards when not needed (which has a "real" effect on them), or just underplaying, and also missing out.

I think that a better approach, if people are concerned about the "bad roll means I die" aspect of things, is to reduce the dependency of death/failure on single die rolls in the first place (or single card uses). The use of cards doesn't change that problem, it just changes the specifics of how it manifests. Now, I'm not worried about dying because I rolled poorly, but because I run into a "save or die" situation, right when I already used up the cards that would have saved me. And it has the added problem (which I touched on before) of potential gaming by the GM in that both parties probably know which cards that PC has already played. Players already sometimes feel like they were targettted when/if the GM has something really bad happen and they have to roll to avoid it. That's going to be doubled down on, when the player knows that the GM knows that he already used the cards he needs to save his character, and then hits him with the "save or <bad thing>" anyway.

Which would seem to only maximize the pressure on the GM to fudge things to avoid such things *or* risk the players being upset at the GM for putting them in a known impossible situation.


As I said, this was purely about showing how luck can be taken off the table. There are trade-offs. The people I played with that didn't like it gave their reason as not wanting to have no shot at a lucky streak - there are other possible reasons, of course, like your concern (although your concern and theirs are closer than you may think - wanting to always have that possibility, no matter how small, of getting the roll you need is not that different from wanting the possibility of a lucky streak). But I don't think it can be argued that it doesn't create a lot of meaningful choices in relation to the thread topic. Every roll becomes a meaningful choice - you are choosing what to get for that roll, knowing that this choice will further constrain future choices. If you go into a fight with nothing but low cards, you had to have used your high cards for something else before. You knew when you did that that it would mean that later on you would have the equivalent of low rolls, but you made a choice that it would be better to have the high results at that time and the low results later.

And do you think that knowledge will make the player feel better, or worse, than if each time, he's just rolling dice?

And it does highlight a problem that always exists between GMs and players. How much do the players expect the GM to "cover for them" if/when they make poor decisions? Imagine, you have a player who just likes it when his player "wins" (cause don't they all?). So this player just always usees his best cards as early as possible, to do as well as he can. We can objectively say that he "used up his luck" already, so when you hit him with something after that point, and he epically fails (due to not having any good cards left), it's his own choice. But IME, that's *never* how that kind of player will see it.

He's going to see it as the GM being unfair for hitting him with something when the GM knows he's out of good cards. He's going to come to expect that the GM should provide a fluff encounter, and skill rolls, or minor things, so he can use up his low cards, and then get a new set of high cards to "kick some butt!" again. While we can certainly say that this is bad playing on the part of the player, that isn't going to change that this may create some conflicts and unhappiness as a result. You just make it about die rolls, and the problem is eliminated.

And yeah. This is setting aside that not every scene is the same. Not all require high skill rolls to succeed, nor is the importance of a given success or failure the same. But the weight on each is treated the same based on the card use. A 17 card used to succeed in spotting some minor thing is a lot different than the same 17 used to evade a fireball. This kind a loops back to "you're playing a mini-game here", where the players are trying to guess how many different die rolls may exist between "right now" and "when it's going to be really important", and adjust their behavior and card use accordingly. If I know that we're going to spend the next few days sitting around town, I'm going to be more confident using high cards for social skills, perception skills, bargaining for a good sale price for loot, etc. But if I know that we're about to be attacked by the mercs sent by our number one enemy, I'm going to want to fail those things, so I can save my "good cards" for that.

Dunno. It just seems like it would make that guessing game more important than the stats and whatnot on the character sheet itself. And that's before getting into the real fact that "dice don't have memory". The fact that you were just really lucky (or unlucky) does not actually change the probabilities of being really lucky or unlucky again one bit. Your odds of drawing a straight flush this hand, is exactly the same if you drew one last hand as if you didn't. But this mechanic somehow imposes some sort of "conservation of luck" in the game universe. I just find that... odd.


Again. Better to just make luck less of a facor for the major stuff in the first place IMO. Details along the way? Sure. But big "live or die" stuff? Luck should have very very little to do with it.


EDIT: Oh. There's another reason why I think I dislike this idea. It will make characters with low skills in some things, much more hesitant to try them. If I have like 1 skill point assigned to some skill, and a situation comes up where I could use it (let's assume this is some minor social skill maybe), the card system effectively requires that I use up one of my higher cards to have a shot at succeeding with the skill. So I now become less capable later because I did this one thing now. That just doesn't sit well with me. I like to encourage my players to try things, even if they aren't that good at it. That character who just put one point in sense motive? Go ahead and try it. You might get lucky and get something useful. Or not. But it costs you zero to use that skill whenever a situation comes up to use it. In the card system? There now is a cost . And it kinda reinforces bad play IMO. The honest player, who honestly wants to attempt to use that sense motive skill, is going to want to (need to?) use a high card to have a chance to succeed. Which hurts him. The dishonest player, will just walk around using sense motive, as often as possible, and playing low cards, so as to burn through them and get more high cards in his hand.

You've turned "luck" into a game resource that the player has control over. I'm not sure I agree with that.

[KorvinStarmast]

You've turned "luck" into a game resource that the player has control over. I'm not sure I agree with that. Interesting thought. How do you feel about the Lucky feat, or the Halfling racial feature of luck?

[Herbert_W]

But a hybrid system could avoid [the weirdness of 'intentionally burning cards' to trigger a refresh]. Lets say you can refresh a hand of 7 cards once per something like a short rest. Whenever you are trying to do something that would require a roll, you can choose either to roll or substitute a card . . .

This is very strongly reminiscent of a diviner's Portent, except that you've given players more uses and made it into a core mechanic rather than just a class feature.

Like Portent, it has both offensive and defensive uses. Also like Portent, there's a potential for players to never use it offensively because they're saving it in case they need it defensively. (There's some potentially-unintended interactions where a high roll is good offensively for attacks and defensively for saves, unless you also rework saves to get rid of the defender-rolls aspect.)

Compare this to hit points. Hit points were added back in the very early days of the game to solve exactly this problem: they make it impossible for a character outside of very low levels to be felled by a single blow from a level-appropriate foe. Save-or-die effects intentionally bypass hit points. If you don't like that, the simplest (not necessarily best) solution is to just not bypass hit points. You could make Disintegrate deal damage and only reduce a creature to dust if it is already reduced to 0hp, etc.

I think the biggest difference between this expanded Portent and HP is that the former tempts players to get "greedy" by spending too much of it offensively and the latter tempts players to get "greedy" by pushing forwards despite it running low.

[NichG]

Like Portent, it has both offensive and defensive uses. Also like Portent, there's a potential for players to never use it offensively because they're saving it in case they need it defensively. (There's some potentially-unintended interactions where a high roll is good offensively for attacks and defensively for saves, unless you also rework saves to get rid of the defender-rolls aspect.)

That was actually intentional to make cards lower than the average of the roll still be useful. So all your low cards are defensive and all your high cards are offensive (or 'proactive') and you wouldn't ever be trading offense for defense, it'd all be about timing - which roll do you want to force?

It'd be nice to have low cards work defensively for saves rather than needing high cards for that. But if you make the attacker roll against 10+save, AoEs and save or dies are just so much more efficient of a card use that its kind of too obvious (and casters end up getting much more mileage out of cards than non-casters in that case as well, due to being able to synergize two limited resources together). It's a kludge but you could just say 'when using cards on saves, take 11-value as the value of the card'.

Anyhow, the point of something like this for me wouldn't be to make death less likely, it'd be to remove 'non-actions' from the game - e.g. things where you try to do something but then afterwards find out 'oh that failed', so your action may as well have not happened. Personally I much prefer a case where when you fail its because you decided that success was not worth the cost. Or you just know in advance that you can't afford to succeed at a particular thing, so you don't initiate the action that will end up getting nulled out in the first place.

I still prefer the thing I described up-thread where you roll and pay off complications, because with that I could say 'you can't try again - your roll establishes the complications that are now just things about the situation, so if you ever want to succeed on e.g. picking this particular lock, you'll need to pay off those particular complications'. That really makes it so that trying to do something always leaves the game in a new state - either you do it (and pay off the cost/accept the consequences) or you see the price and say no, but now the price is known and fixed whereas before it was not. So it cleans up a lot of the 'I keep trying until I succeed' or 'I roll, fail, okay fine when play returns to me in 20 minutes I'll just do the exact same thing again' kinds of dynamics that can sometimes crop up in D&D.

[gbaji]

Interesting thought. How do you feel about the Lucky feat, or the Halfling racial feature of luck?

I don't know how either work specifically, but assuming that these are in game effects on existing rules, and not broad changes to the rules themselves, I don't think they are the same. Something that adds some plusses to existing rolls (or even limited re-rolls) isn't the same as replacing the concept of rolling in the first place.

I'm not even adverse to variations on "karma point" type systems. And honestly, if your really trying to fix the problem of "pointless deaths" in a game, adopting something like that may be far more fruitfull (and less likely to create other problems), than replacing the core resolution dynamic of the game itself.

My issue is with the very concept of "you wil get exactly one of each possible numerical die result and choose when to use them". I just see a system like that causing far more problems than it solves.

[Vahnavoi]

I've stayed away from the card-based thing because of the weirdness of 'intentionally burning cards' to trigger a refresh.

I think people overestimate both the ease and impact of doing so. Consider: just like in a dice-based game, not every action requires a roll, a game master in a card-based game can just pass and fail trivial actions without allowing spending and refreshing of cards. This means only impactful actions are left for "burning", at minimum costing time on the game clock.

For example, if a player is left with seven worst cards and wants to get a full hand for the next big event, now they have to plot seven moves in a limited time period where failing on purpose won't by itself screw them over. It shouldn't be assumed to be trivial.

For a similar reason, I think gbaji is prematurely and pointlessly playing a scare schord about perfect play. Yes, perfect information and deterministic rules mean perfect play is possible. We have great many deterministic perfect information games exemplifying how actually playing perfectly can be hard task for a trained mathematician, and utterly impossible for a layman to do on the fly. Since players can have more than one possible move to use a card on at any given point, the complexity space for open cards roleplaying game is open-ended. For example, if each decision point has two mutually exclusive forks, and a player has 20 cards, optimally using all those cards requires the player to think 20 moves ahead and identifying desireable paths from over a million (2^20) options.

In other words, cards make a roleplaying game trivial only if the rest of it is already trivial. But it sells everyone short to weigh the merit of a concept based on a trivial implementation. It's equal to weighing Chess based on Tic Tac Toe.

[KorvinStarmast]

Something that adds some plusses to existing rolls (or even limited re-rolls) isn't the same as replacing the concept of rolling in the first place. Got it. Thanks.

I'm not even adverse to variations on "karma point" type systems.
In the "Pirates and Dragons" d6 game, you get doubloons at the beginning of each session that you can spend to avert really bad outcomes. Seems similar to karma points.

[kyoryu]

I don't know how either work specifically, but assuming that these are in game effects on existing rules, and not broad changes to the rules themselves, I don't think they are the same. Something that adds some plusses to existing rolls (or even limited re-rolls) isn't the same as replacing the concept of rolling in the first place.

Agreed. It mixes in some of the "choose your fate" aspects of the card into a more traditional randomized system.


I'm not even adverse to variations on "karma point" type systems. And honestly, if your really trying to fix the problem of "pointless deaths" in a game, adopting something like that may be far more fruitfull (and less likely to create other problems), than replacing the core resolution dynamic of the game itself.

I mean... the easiest solution is twofold:
1. Ensuring you can retreat from battle reliably
2. "Death just means that you're out of the fight - exactly what that means is up to the person that took you out".

But, yeah, some limited rerolls can help, too.


My issue is with the very concept of "you wil get exactly one of each possible numerical die result and choose when to use them". I just see a system like that causing far more problems than it solves.

You could do a hybrid system, where you draw n cards from a deck and have to use them before your next draw. That retains some level of luck, while still giving you the "choose when to use what" stuff. The only issue here is people calling for meaningless rolls to blow through bad cards, but I think that's reasonably solvable. At some level, you want people to use the bad cards on things they care less about - you just probably want it to not be on utterly meaningless things. (The basic answer, of course, is "don't call for rolls on meaningless things"). The bonuses/fate/karma system gets rid of this while still allowing for some of the "what do you care about?" gameplay implicitly, as the choice isn't "use the good card or the bad card" the choice is then "I only have n of these good things to use, is this important enough to blow one?" Unimportant stuff is kind of a no-op, then, you just need to make sure you have enough important things that the choice of using it is actually interesting enough that you will have times you want to use the bonus/reroll but don't because you think something even more important will be coming up.

[NichG]

I think people overestimate both the ease and impact of doing so. Consider: just like in a dice-based game, not every action requires a roll, a game master in a card-based game can just pass and fail trivial actions without allowing spending and refreshing of cards. This means only impactful actions are left for "burning", at minimum costing time on the game clock.

For example, if a player is left with seven worst cards and wants to get a full hand for the next big event, now they have to plot seven moves in a limited time period where failing on purpose won't by itself screw them over. It shouldn't be assumed to be trivial.


That introduces a lot of onus on the GM to prop up the system, take an antagonistic stance towards what the players are trying to accomplish (e.g. it encourages proactively searching for reasons why they can't refresh their hand, when being able to 'take 20' on particular things would be distorting otherwise), and it also creates the potential for a lot of OOC negotiation bogging down play. I think it was the guy behind Arcen Games who said something like "If the optimal course of action in a game is tedious or boring, people will either feel compelled to do it and be bored, or will feel bad about the fact that they could have done better and chose not to". Controlling refresh and in general hand manipulation is a centrally important strategy for most card-based games; something where you refresh your hand when you use it up strongly signals 'if you have only bad cards, you should find trivial stuff to burn them on to get a refresh' as the actual strategic thing to do, so it's going to be that kind of situation for a lot of players. Given that some of the stuff I want to try to design away from is situations like this that already occur with D&D and some other dice-based systems, this isn't the correct design direction to go in.

This isn't saying that card based mechanics are never appropriate. But I'd use them for much more restricted segments of play rather than as a long-term resource, *especially* if basic system functions rely on someone always having a card at hand. Because then you must either deny agency of when to try things that would require a card, or just accept that the player will be able to get the maximum possible result whenever there isn't time pressure, even if there's consequence-of-failure pressure. On the other hand, if cards are an 'extra' then you can just not make it automatic to refresh them when you're out, and that resolves some of the issue. Or even if cards are needed for taking any action at all you can still say 'when you're out you're out and you can't act' and avoid the refresh metagame, but that doesn't work well when things external to the character can force a card to be played (like saving throws, or just the GM calling for checks for whatever reason).

Crusader mechanics are basically a card draw and refresh mechanic like this. They're great in combat, but once you get out of combat they really encourage weird little rituals to get access to infinite healing - start up a spar with your party members to draw a hand, punch a tree to trigger a heal if you drew one, otherwise surrender and then start the spar up again. It's silly and in practice the GM can and should just say 'no, you can't do that', but from the perspective of a designer it would be better to have avoided that in the first place so you're not handing every GM this little conflict to resolve every time they have a new player or group who has the same old idea.

So 'just replace dice with cards and play D&D' wouldn't be my approach.

[Darth Credence]

I guess for me, it has to go a bit further - not just a delta, but an informed delta. Or maybe another way to look at it is, there are lots of different kinds of ways to perceive deltas. Maybe it boils down into three categories: 'you can predict the delta', 'you can retrodict the delta', and 'there's a delta but you can't tell'.

For me, the 'predictive deltas' are the most meaningful, even when the prediction ends up being wrong. It kind of ties to agency - there's a situation, my choice can influence the situation, and I know enough about how my choice might influence the situation to feel like if the situation goes one way or another way it was my responsibility.


That introduces a lot of onus on the GM to prop up the system, take an antagonistic stance towards what the players are trying to accomplish (e.g. it encourages proactively searching for reasons why they can't refresh their hand, when being able to 'take 20' on particular things would be distorting otherwise), and it also creates the potential for a lot of OOC negotiation bogging down play. I think it was the guy behind Arcen Games who said something like "If the optimal course of action in a game is tedious or boring, people will either feel compelled to do it and be bored, or will feel bad about the fact that they could have done better and chose not to". Controlling refresh and in general hand manipulation is a centrally important strategy for most card-based games; something where you refresh your hand when you use it up strongly signals 'if you have only bad cards, you should find trivial stuff to burn them on to get a refresh' as the actual strategic thing to do, so it's going to be that kind of situation for a lot of players. Given that some of the stuff I want to try to design away from is situations like this that already occur with D&D and some other dice-based systems, this isn't the correct design direction to go in.

This isn't saying that card based mechanics are never appropriate. But I'd use them for much more restricted segments of play rather than as a long-term resource, *especially* if basic system functions rely on someone always having a card at hand. Because then you must either deny agency of when to try things that would require a card, or just accept that the player will be able to get the maximum possible result whenever there isn't time pressure, even if there's consequence-of-failure pressure. On the other hand, if cards are an 'extra' then you can just not make it automatic to refresh them when you're out, and that resolves some of the issue. Or even if cards are needed for taking any action at all you can still say 'when you're out you're out and you can't act' and avoid the refresh metagame, but that doesn't work well when things external to the character can force a card to be played (like saving throws, or just the GM calling for checks for whatever reason).

Crusader mechanics are basically a card draw and refresh mechanic like this. They're great in combat, but once you get out of combat they really encourage weird little rituals to get access to infinite healing - start up a spar with your party members to draw a hand, punch a tree to trigger a heal if you drew one, otherwise surrender and then start the spar up again. It's silly and in practice the GM can and should just say 'no, you can't do that', but from the perspective of a designer it would be better to have avoided that in the first place so you're not handing every GM this little conflict to resolve every time they have a new player or group who has the same old idea.

So 'just replace dice with cards and play D&D' wouldn't be my approach.

That first quote up there was your first in the thread, third overall. I would say that cards in place of dice (and I would like to reiterate here that this was purely a statement of, "hey, you can eliminate the dice randomness by doing this" as a way to stimulate thought about randomness) fits your predictive model

Let's say it is only for the d20. You start with the full deck. You engage in a fight with an orc that is described to you as having only one eye, wearing ring mail of a higher quality than the dross worn by most of the other orcs, shield in one hand and spear in the other, and it is charging you.You know your bonuses to hit. You know that ringmail is heavy armor, so dexterity of the creature shouldn't matter. You know basic ringmail provides AC14, and a shield would bump that to 16. You may have a question in your mind as to whether or not that armor is enchanted, since it is described as better quality than the other orcs, but since the others were called out as dross, maybe that just means it's normal armor.

You have a +5 to hit with your attack, so you know you probably need at least an 11, but if it's enchanted that could go up a bit. If you've fought a lot of orcs, you may identify the exact type, and have a good idea about its hp, but if not, you can guess higher than most orcs because of the higher quality armor. Your question to yourself is, do I use the 11 and hope it's normal armor; do I use a 12 or 13 just in case it is enchanted, or is it appropriate to crit here? (If you're a paladin and can smite, that might be a way to one shot the creature, but that could also be a waste.) You make that decision knowing that an 11 may or may not hit, a 12, 13, or 14 would be the way to make up for possibly magic armor, and a 20 will let you double the attack damage dice, but it will also mean you have to "roll" 19 more times to get another 20. You choose, the combat continues, and in the end you have spent your cards knowing what they would do for you and what the tradeoff was farther down the line. Seems to fit your preferred type of informed choice as well as anything could.

And I would disagree about this being a burden to the DM to prop something up any more than how a DM is already burdened doing it. The DM should already not be calling for rolls if they don't matter. If there is no possibility of success, there shouldn't be a roll. That's more important with cards, I think, because if someone saves up their 20 to ask the king to abdicate in favor of them, if the DM let's them roll for it, there is now a major issue at the table. Not letting people roll whenever they want is not "denying agency". It is the DM's job and a basic part of the game. The players can say they want to do something - that's the agency they have. If they want to jump across a 2000' wide canyon, the DM is not denying their agency by not giving them a roll and just saying that they leap their strength scores into the gap and then fall the rest of the way. If they say they want to jump across a 4' wide creek bed that is 6" deep, it is not denying agency to tell them that they can easily make the jump all day long without a roll. It's the DM doing their job and adjudicating how the world works and whether or not players succeed.

I understand that "just replace dice with cards" would not be your approach, and it's not mine either as I have never done it. But if you look at it from the point of view of "this changes a random dice roll into a player choice", it helps (me, at least) clarify just how important that actually is. I find it interesting that the people who have reacted most strongly against the idea are also ones who had pretty strong views about eliminating randomness. gbaji said in their earlier posts that they would never kill a character based on one die roll that they had to make. Well, ending up unable to pass a save would only happen in this type of play if the person has already chosen to use the cards that would have let them make the save. So they could hold their head high as the character is killed due to failing the save, knowing that the player could have held a 19 in their hand. But, gbaji also said in response to the method that they would not want to use it, partially because of how bad it would feel if they chose poorly on what card to use and had to live with future consequences of that choice.

I really think that's the value of throwing that method out there - how much do you really want to eliminate randomness and make it all about choices made by the player? It may not be the best method to do so, but it would do so, and it certainly brings up a lot of reasons to not do it.

[Vahnavoi]

That introduces a lot of onus on the GM to prop up the system, take an antagonistic stance towards what the players are trying to accomplish (e.g. it encourages proactively searching for reasons why they can't refresh their hand, when being able to 'take 20' on particular things would be distorting otherwise) and it also creates the potential for a lot of OOC negotiation bogging down play.

No, it places an onus on the game master to make non-trivial scenarios. Characterizing that as antagonistic is either a mistake or irrelevant, since antagonism of the type "don't let players win too easily" isn't pathological. The game master does play the antagonist roles and is meant to deliver some degree of skill-bases challenge by doing so, and a card-based system allows them a fairly straightforward way to adjust difficulty when doing so.

Potential for OOC negotiation? Like, say, the kind we see in dice-based games, when players whine and beg to roll the dice at improper times, as naked lobbying for advantage and out of the mistaken impression that rolling dice is the sole way to achieve anything? That kind of negotiation? The way to cut that out is to tell those players a hard no and move on. The solution to this particular problem does not lie in domain of number generation, it lies in the domain of social conduct and creating respect towards a game master's position as game referee.


I think it was the guy behind Arcen Games who said something like "If the optimal course of action in a game is tedious or boring, people will either feel compelled to do it and be bored, or will feel bad about the fact that they could have done better and chose not to". Controlling refresh and in general hand manipulation is a centrally important strategy for most card-based games; something where you refresh your hand when you use it up strongly signals 'if you have only bad cards, you should find trivial stuff to burn them on to get a refresh' as the actual strategic thing to do, so it's going to be that kind of situation for a lot of players. Given that some of the stuff I want to try to design away from is situations like this that already occur with D&D and some other dice-based systems, this isn't the correct design direction to go in.

I've heard that quote too and I'm not contesting that manipulation of hands and refresh rates can be important aspects of strategy. What I do think that you're misapplying the principles to the point of turning them on their head.

Consider: when players can do trivial actions to refresh their hand, that is the tedious and boring optimal course referred to in the quote. By disallowing that, the optimal course is shifted to something else. It is perfectly possible, as matter of rules, to direct emphasis of hand manipulation and refresh rate manipulation to areas of game where they serve to create interesting gameplay. Removal of degenerate strategies from play is one the most straightforward ways to do that and the actual lesson taught to me when I first encountered that quote.

For comparison, in a dice game, the equivalent tedious and boring course is rerolling dice until the player gets the result they want- and the solution is to take control of rerolls away from the player. Every version of D&D has had mechanics of this type. "Take 10" and "Take 20" obviously exist for this. So does the AD&D rule that certain feats (such as picking a lock) can only be attempted once per character level.

[Mordar]

I understand that "just replace dice with cards" would not be your approach, and it's not mine either as I have never done it. But if you look at it from the point of view of "this changes a random dice roll into a player choice", it helps (me, at least) clarify just how important that actually is. I find it interesting that the people who have reacted most strongly against the idea are also ones who had pretty strong views about eliminating randomness. gbaji said in their earlier posts that they would never kill a character based on one die roll that they had to make. Well, ending up unable to pass a save would only happen in this type of play if the person has already chosen to use the cards that would have let them make the save. So they could hold their head high as the character is killed due to failing the save, knowing that the player could have held a 19 in their hand. But, gbaji also said in response to the method that they would not want to use it, partially because of how bad it would feel if they chose poorly on what card to use and had to live with future consequences of that choice.

I really think that's the value of throwing that method out there - how much do you really want to eliminate randomness and make it all about choices made by the player? It may not be the best method to do so, but it would do so, and it certainly brings up a lot of reasons to not do it.

My point, and mine alone, is that eliminating chance (not randomness IMO, but other people probably have a better handle on definitions) is contrary to my needs in a game - RPG, card game, basketball, whatever. Agency, IMO, should never mean certainty. On the cover, I agree with NichG's first quote about having an impact on the situation to sway chance in my favor...but still facing uncertainty.

I don't mind the idea of card-based chance systems, even as you describe maybe with some modifications, but removing chance altogether for me reduces risk and reduces enjoyment. Especially since (now, especially) we have so many ways to mitigate the one-roll-oops-death.


Consider: when players can do trivial actions to refresh their hand, that is the tedious and boring optimal course referred to in the quote. By disallowing that, the optimal course is shifted to something else. It is perfectly possible, as matter of rules, to direct emphasis of hand manipulation and refresh rate manipulation to areas of game where they serve to create interesting gameplay. Removal of degenerate strategies from play is one the most straightforward ways to do that and the actual lesson taught to me when I first encountered that quote.

Unless there is some limitation on the resource itself? Card dumping in a "reshuffle" game is often a clear easy choice. Card dumping when your Fate deck is a trim 30 cards is a very impactful choice. Maybe in this system randomly remove one card from the pool each refresh until a sufficient rest occurs? Still don't like the idea for fantasy RPG, but maybe that makes it a bit more palatable to some.

- M

[NichG]

That first quote up there was your first in the thread, third overall. I would say that cards in place of dice (and I would like to reiterate here that this was purely a statement of, "hey, you can eliminate the dice randomness by doing this" as a way to stimulate thought about randomness) fits your predictive model

Somewhere in this thread in the sub-discussion about luck we went from 'making the players choices meaningful' to 'making the dice meaningful', which I think is at least a partial error anyhow with regards to the proposed point of 'delta'. E.g. I don't care if the dice feel useless, but I do care if my players feel useless.



Let's say it is only for the d20. You start with the full deck. You engage in a fight with an orc that is described to you as having only one eye, wearing ring mail of a higher quality than the dross worn by most of the other orcs, shield in one hand and spear in the other, and it is charging you.You know your bonuses to hit. You know that ringmail is heavy armor, so dexterity of the creature shouldn't matter. You know basic ringmail provides AC14, and a shield would bump that to 16. You may have a question in your mind as to whether or not that armor is enchanted, since it is described as better quality than the other orcs, but since the others were called out as dross, maybe that just means it's normal armor.

You have a +5 to hit with your attack, so you know you probably need at least an 11, but if it's enchanted that could go up a bit. If you've fought a lot of orcs, you may identify the exact type, and have a good idea about its hp, but if not, you can guess higher than most orcs because of the higher quality armor. Your question to yourself is, do I use the 11 and hope it's normal armor; do I use a 12 or 13 just in case it is enchanted, or is it appropriate to crit here? (If you're a paladin and can smite, that might be a way to one shot the creature, but that could also be a waste.) You make that decision knowing that an 11 may or may not hit, a 12, 13, or 14 would be the way to make up for possibly magic armor, and a 20 will let you double the attack damage dice, but it will also mean you have to "roll" 19 more times to get another 20. You choose, the combat continues, and in the end you have spent your cards knowing what they would do for you and what the tradeoff was farther down the line. Seems to fit your preferred type of informed choice as well as anything could.


My preferred scale for the meaningful consequences of choices is a bit larger than the time between hand refreshes. 'What facilities do you buy for your castle?' not 'do I hit this orc now but miss the dragon later?'. But I think its going to be a distraction about this design point since its rather a separate thing.

The specific reason I want roll-for-cost vs roll-for-success types of mechanics in the context of this thread, was the point about how randomness in tends to dilute agency because it has to be able to cause successes or failures in order for it to be meaningful but then that removes those outcomes from being consequences of the player's own choices. Pivoting to cost avoids that in the sense that instead its asking the question 'how do you relatively prioritize the various things you want, and how do the things you want depend on each-other, when sometimes you can have more of them or fewer of them than you expected?'. Having those costs have multiple ways to be paid further increases the meaningful choices that can be made.

E.g. something like, here's a catalogue of 100000s of gp worth of home base improvements. You have 20000gp to spend, so you're already making long-term meaningful choices about which things to get and which things not to get. Now add into that the possibility of up to 25% cost overruns or underruns. Maybe some of those improvements are only meaningful if you can have them together, so when you encounter that budget overrun you have to figure out another way to arrange things. Maybe you have an underrun and you can get a few extra things now that you wouldn't have considered otherwise. Maybe because you really need all the pieces you picked, you take a loan or use some other way to make things work rather than just giving up on your design. The consequences of the budget rolls are relatively permanent, but they also at the same time don't replace player agency in determining the outcome - instead they modulate the way in which the player has to express their agency.

Or, you're running a team of explorers through the jungle and you only have so much food and water and medicine and such. There are 60 days worth (counting travelling times) of different things to explore at around 1-2 days of travel to get to each (but deep things stay deep), you can only really bring 10 days of supplies with you at a time, and random events may cause you to take longer, lose (or gain) supplies, etc. Randomness in costs means you'll have a different set of journeys as you explore that jungle and you might end up in a failure state if you take big risks, but mostly what it's doing is forcing players to expose their priorities: "I'd rather go to 5 nearby sites" vs "There's one far away site I really want to get to, lets ignore the nearby sites and beeline for it" vs "Okay maybe this trip we spend building a road and a base in the jungle that we can use to stock supplies". What gets sacrificed, what gets re-arranged, etc when things go wrong?



And I would disagree about this being a burden to the DM to prop something up any more than how a DM is already burdened doing it. The DM should already not be calling for rolls if they don't matter. If there is no possibility of success, there shouldn't be a roll. That's more important with cards, I think, because if someone saves up their 20 to ask the king to abdicate in favor of them, if the DM let's them roll for it, there is now a major issue at the table. Not letting people roll whenever they want is not "denying agency". It is the DM's job and a basic part of the game. The players can say they want to do something - that's the agency they have. If they want to jump across a 2000' wide canyon, the DM is not denying their agency by not giving them a roll and just saying that they leap their strength scores into the gap and then fall the rest of the way. If they say they want to jump across a 4' wide creek bed that is 6" deep, it is not denying agency to tell them that they can easily make the jump all day long without a roll. It's the DM doing their job and adjudicating how the world works and whether or not players succeed.


If I'm designing a new system, I don't have to take on all of the failings of the current system either - I can aim to do better.

If every time a player calls for a roll it has a cost, then naturally players won't call for specious rolls, which means in that case its fine to put the ability to call for rolls back into players' hands. Which then becomes one less thing for the DM to worry about. Yes you still have to make sure that what a roll can accomplish is bounded in a sane manner, and that costs and consequences are such that you don't get crazy stuff like trading a kingdom for a feather. But that's not too hard to do if you just avoid being too open-ended and vague in the wrong places (especially trying to reduce things like persuasion to a single, unilateral action).

I'd instead have something more like you can't roll to make the king do a thing, but you could roll to get some blackmail material on the king if you want. That's a 12d10 difficulty and your skill rating of 6 means that rolls of 4 and lower are complications, and the buy-off price is Influence. Going for it? Okay, you rolled 5 consequences, so lets see:
1. The king finds out you're looking and sends guards to arrest you,
2. The criminal underworld also finds out what you find out and they move to simultaneously use it,
3. It ends up costing 8000gp to get the information,
4. The blackmail material has errors in it but you don't know which bits are true and which bits are false, lean too heavily on a false bit and the king will just ignore your threat,
5. You end up implicating yourself and someone random gains blackmail material against you in exchange for you getting this stuff.

So if you pay 5 Influence, you've got your blackmail material and no consequences and you can move to your stage 2 of trying to leverage it against the king. If you want to keep your Influence, now you have these five problems to deal with. Maybe you buy off getting arrested and the errors in the blackmail material, but you don't care if the underworld also knows or if someone has something on you and 8000gp is no big deal. If Influence took you a month to generate per point, well, you're probably seriously going to consider taking some of those side-effects but probably not all of them.

That's the sort of thing I'm imagining anyhow. It's not D&D and it wouldn't be trying to be faithful to D&D.



I understand that "just replace dice with cards" would not be your approach, and it's not mine either as I have never done it. But if you look at it from the point of view of "this changes a random dice roll into a player choice", it helps (me, at least) clarify just how important that actually is. I find it interesting that the people who have reacted most strongly against the idea are also ones who had pretty strong views about eliminating randomness. gbaji said in their earlier posts that they would never kill a character based on one die roll that they had to make. Well, ending up unable to pass a save would only happen in this type of play if the person has already chosen to use the cards that would have let them make the save. So they could hold their head high as the character is killed due to failing the save, knowing that the player could have held a 19 in their hand. But, gbaji also said in response to the method that they would not want to use it, partially because of how bad it would feel if they chose poorly on what card to use and had to live with future consequences of that choice.

I really think that's the value of throwing that method out there - how much do you really want to eliminate randomness and make it all about choices made by the player? It may not be the best method to do so, but it would do so, and it certainly brings up a lot of reasons to not do it.

Well its fair enough. My position is more, I've traversed this design ground before and rejected it because for long-term usage it felt awkward and inelegant and created more problems for me to design around down-stream than it ever solved. Whereas I have also used some variants of 'you get to decide when you fail a save' that have actually worked as far as the kind of gameplay I wanted to achieve, but whose implementations were a bit mathematically cumbersome (involved doing division, even if it was always division-by-5, to figure out the right amount to spend).

Don't get me wrong, I like the *idea* of card-based games. But I think they work better when the refresh is fixed and the game has a precise tempo to it, like 'one card per round, only used in combat' versus 'an hour of play could represent 1 minute of time or 1 month of time, and you might be rolling to invent a spell over that month or to dodge a single fireball from an assassin' that you can get in the full TTRPG space.

[gbaji]

For a similar reason, I think gbaji is prematurely and pointlessly playing a scare schord about perfect play. Yes, perfect information and deterministic rules mean perfect play is possible. We have great many deterministic perfect information games exemplifying how actually playing perfectly can be hard task for a trained mathematician, and utterly impossible for a layman to do on the fly. Since players can have more than one possible move to use a card on at any given point, the complexity space for open cards roleplaying game is open-ended. For example, if each decision point has two mutually exclusive forks, and a player has 20 cards, optimally using all those cards requires the player to think 20 moves ahead and identifying desireable paths from over a million (2^20) options.

The problem with this is that you are (once again) discussing RPG systems by introducing concepts from non-RPG games, and typically exclusively PvP games. When there is no referee, perfect knowledge games work great. Chess, checkers, etc. But the second you have a GM running a RPG, perfect knowledge goes out the window for the players (but not for the GM). Which is what I spoke about before. Even your response supports my problem. The GM will have to "rig" things to make this work. The GM has to decide which rolls are significant, and which are not. That very choice represents an impact to how the game itself will be played.

And... IMO, incorrectly focuses said game only on what the GM considers "important", and away from what the players may. It also may unfairly penalize or reward PCs based on build choices. If the GM thinks that perception and social skills are "unimportant" and thus don't require rolls/cards, then PCs who focus on such things may well feel cheated ("I spent 5 points on spot, but the GM never has me roll it, and just tells the entire party what we see"). The kind of system that would utilize this sort of card/hand mechanic would basically require focus purely on a "same level" basis, and most of the time that "same level" would be "combat encounters" (or some kind of "life and death" situation).

So sure. If you're the kind of GM who runs adventures via narration to the players and "ok. You encounter X, roll initiative", then this system will work perfectly. But if you want to have a more descriptive game, with more choices for PCs, and where information perceived/learned/gathered informs their choices and *those choices* then lead to encounters/conflicts, such a system will not work well at all. I lean heavily towards the latter sytle of game running.


In other words, cards make a roleplaying game trivial only if the rest of it is already trivial. But it sells everyone short to weigh the merit of a concept based on a trivial implementation. It's equal to weighing Chess based on Tic Tac Toe.

I disagree. Your own post says that the way to make it work is to force a bunch of things we might normally use rolls to determine to be determined by GM fiat instead. That's absolutely 100% about trivializing all of that "other stuff" in the game. And it's not surprising really. I commented on this earlier. Not all things we roll dice for in a game session have equal weight and import. So, to make this work, you have to make each card expenditure of a given value card of equal value (otherwise, you will get players tossing low cards at low impact actions). But to do that, your propsed method is "just don't roll for anything not important". To me, that trivializes a good portion of the game. RPGs are about roleplaying. They are not exclusively combat/encounter simulators. But your solution kinda requires the latter approach.


Let's say it is only for the d20. You start with the full deck. You engage in a fight with an orc that is described to you as having only one eye, wearing ring mail of a higher quality than the dross worn by most of the other orcs, shield in one hand and spear in the other, and it is charging you.You know your bonuses to hit. You know that ringmail is heavy armor, so dexterity of the creature shouldn't matter. You know basic ringmail provides AC14, and a shield would bump that to 16. You may have a question in your mind as to whether or not that armor is enchanted, since it is described as better quality than the other orcs, but since the others were called out as dross, maybe that just means it's normal armor.

You have a +5 to hit with your attack, so you know you probably need at least an 11, but if it's enchanted that could go up a bit. If you've fought a lot of orcs, you may identify the exact type, and have a good idea about its hp, but if not, you can guess higher than most orcs because of the higher quality armor. Your question to yourself is, do I use the 11 and hope it's normal armor; do I use a 12 or 13 just in case it is enchanted, or is it appropriate to crit here? (If you're a paladin and can smite, that might be a way to one shot the creature, but that could also be a waste.) You make that decision knowing that an 11 may or may not hit, a 12, 13, or 14 would be the way to make up for possibly magic armor, and a 20 will let you double the attack damage dice, but it will also mean you have to "roll" 19 more times to get another 20. You choose, the combat continues, and in the end you have spent your cards knowing what they would do for you and what the tradeoff was farther down the line. Seems to fit your preferred type of informed choice as well as anything could.

Which leads to another problem with this system. Time. One of the biggest complaints about many RPGs is the time it take to run an encounter/combat. Given that's already the case, you are replacing "Player rolls a D20 and adds the already known bonuses to it and reports this to the GM, who compares it to an already known target number and reports the results back" with "player spends 5-10 minutes speculating about what the description by the GM means in terms of AC values, then agonizes over the choice of card to play, plays, then reports the resulting number to the GM (who then compares to said target number and reports back the result as normal).

This is really going to move things in a direction most players don't actually want to go. Takes 2 seconds to roll a die and report the result. The card playing mini-game is now consuming a whole lot of table time.

I'll also point out that everyone on the "pro" side of this idea seems to be restricting the scope of their discussions to just combat. There's more to RPG games than combat. A skill resolution system therefore needs to handle those other things as well, preferably all by using the same mechanical rules.


And I would disagree about this being a burden to the DM to prop something up any more than how a DM is already burdened doing it. The DM should already not be calling for rolls if they don't matter.

Kind of a restating of the opinion I responded to above. Big problem. The GM is providing information to the players by deciding which skills "matter" and which dont. In my game, if a player suspects there might be someone hiding in the bushes, and says "I'm going to look and see if there's someone hiding in the bushes", I will have them roll (or I'll roll for them), and tell them if they spotted someone or not. Not spotting someone could mean that there's no one there *or* or their spot roll wasn't good enough to spot the person who is there. The player doesn't know this. But if the GM simply says "you see no one" without requiring a roll, the player knows there's no one there. What this means is that, to preserve the inability for the player to know for sure, the GM must allow a resolution anytime a player says "I'm going to do <something>", and the mechanics of that resolution method must look exactly the same regardless of whether the attempt is "relevant/important" or not.

So every time a player says "I'm going to listen for sounds of enemies approaching" or "I'm going to look around and see if I see anyone coming/hiding/whatever", the GM *must* follow the same proceedure when there is someone aapproaching, or there is something to see, as when there is not. If we are just rolling dice each time, this is easy to do. If we're handing players decks of cards, we have also handed them the "flush the bad cards" tool for them to use. Again. If your GMing style is that information gathering or investigation or social stuff just doesnt' matter, and you just narrate until "action starts", then this method will work. But I'm really really really not a fan of that style of GMing.

I go the other direction. Lots of rolls, all the time, for lots of things. That's how I move away from "one die roll" outcomes. There is a series of decisions and rolls leading up to "things happening" most of the time (but not always!).



I understand that "just replace dice with cards" would not be your approach, and it's not mine either as I have never done it. But if you look at it from the point of view of "this changes a random dice roll into a player choice", it helps (me, at least) clarify just how important that actually is.

Except that every argument for how to actually implement this and avoid the obvious (flush) pitfalls, involves actually reducing meaningful player choices in the game being played. Sure. You get a choice of exactly the "die result" for any given action, but only on a specific and smallish set of actions that the GM has decided you get to attempt in the first place. Everything else, the GM is apparently just narrating to the players. Nope. Not a fan at all. But if you don't do this, you get the "flush" problem.



I find it interesting that the people who have reacted most strongly against the idea are also ones who had pretty strong views about eliminating randomness. gbaji said in their earlier posts that they would never kill a character based on one die roll that they had to make. Well, ending up unable to pass a save would only happen in this type of play if the person has already chosen to use the cards that would have let them make the save. So they could hold their head high as the character is killed due to failing the save, knowing that the player could have held a 19 in their hand. But, gbaji also said in response to the method that they would not want to use it, partially because of how bad it would feel if they chose poorly on what card to use and had to live with future consequences of that choice.

There's a difference between eliminating "randomness" and eliminating "arbitrariness". I don't use "save or die" mechanics in my games. Even when I play D&D (heck, we houseruled this back in the old AD&D days), we changed poison to "X damage" or "stat reduction" or "AC/to-hit reduction" effects. For exactly this reason. I also tend to allow players to make a lot of die rolls in a game session. Rolls to determine what they see, hear, know, etc. Opportunities to investigate, learn, discover. And yes, this allows the PCs to avoid ever getting into a "you fall down a pit trap and die" and "assasin shoots you from the shadows" sorts of things. They way you eliminate wild vartions as a result of random die rolls is not to reduce the number or rolls (which actually maximizes the impact of each individual roll), but to increase the number. That smooths out the randomness. If your odds are 70% to do something, and you just roll one die one time, you will 100% either succeed or fail. But if the overall result is determined by rolling that several times over the course of an encounter, with each roll having a minor effect reather than a major one, then the overall effect of that 70% chance is "I'm going to do twice as well as someone who only has a 35% chance".

You make success or failure the result of a large number of small effects, rather than a small number of large ones. That's how you eliminate "bad die roll kills me" in a game.

Which yeah. Is the opposite direction that most people seem to want to go with this.


I really think that's the value of throwing that method out there - how much do you really want to eliminate randomness and make it all about choices made by the player? It may not be the best method to do so, but it would do so, and it certainly brings up a lot of reasons to not do it.

Again. One flip of the coin is really random. 100 flips? Not so much.


If every time a player calls for a roll it has a cost, then naturally players won't call for specious rolls, which means in that case its fine to put the ability to call for rolls back into players' hands.

While I technically agree, see above for the additional problems this may introduce into the game.

I guess my problem with the idea of using a fixed set of cards is that in attempting to solve one problem, you introduce another (flush problem). And to fix that one, you must introduce yet another (GM removing player driven actions and providing unintended info to the players as a result). And when you run through the process, you discover that you also really haven't solved the initial problem. Youv'e just modified it a bit. As long as you still have single resolution methodologies with very very high weight (like "save or die"), you will always have this problem. Whether the player feels cheated because they failed the die roll, or because they didn't have a high card left in their hand, it's still going to make them not happy.

Better to reduce and/or eliminate those things from the game itself instead.

I think it's also of general use to note (since this is the general RPG forum), that I play mostly in RQ, whcih is a skill based game. PCs literally only get better at doing things by... doing those things. So it's actually really really important in the game system to give the PCs plenty of opportunities to attempt scans, and searches, and listens, hides, sneaks, conceals, climbs, jumps, etc. Or those skills never improve. If all you do is combat, then no one's ever going to be good at anything but combat (whicih I suppose works, in a very ciruclar way). The proposed card/hand system is problematic for most game systems, but would actually be catastrohpically bad in a game like RQ.

[NichG]

While I technically agree, see above for the additional problems this may introduce into the game.


With what I'm proposing, only the players would ever get to call for (themselves to) roll. Not all actions would require one, but something that does require one also gives you certain guarantees like 'you will succeed if you're willing to pay enough resources'. Anything passive or ongoing or checking against hidden information wouldn't use a roll based system. You would 'roll to spend stamina to increase your alertness for the next 4 hours, which makes it more expensive to stealth near you' rather than 'roll to check for an ambush'.

[gbaji]

With what I'm proposing, only the players would ever get to call for (themselves to) roll. Not all actions would require one, but something that does require one also gives you certain guarantees like 'you will succeed if you're willing to pay enough resources'. Anything passive or ongoing or checking against hidden information wouldn't use a roll based system. You would 'roll to spend stamina to increase your alertness for the next 4 hours, which makes it more expensive to stealth near you' rather than 'roll to check for an ambush'.

Oh! Sure. I think I posted earlier, that I have no issue with PCs having some sort of expendable resource they may selectively use over some time period to give them boost, advantages, do-overs, etc.

I was specifically responding (negatively) to the idea of handing each player a set of 20 cards, each with one of the numbers 1-20 on them (or whatever die range the game would otherwise use), and they then pick which one to play as a direct and complete alternative to rolling a die. Then, I was responding to those saying that the way to avoid players intentionally flushing bad cards in such a system by doing a bunch of minor skill attempts with "don't make them roll for those" as well.

I think that's a monumentally problematic system to use for a RPG system. I will caveat that it may very well be a great system for a non-refereed game, with players opposing eachother and using different levels of otherwise identically "powered" abilities (sort of a rock/paper scissors thing). There are actually a number of games that utilize this sort of concept. Heck, it's basically "Stratego", right? And it's effectively exactly what you are doing in the card game "war". But the moment we're trying to play a game where there are a variety of different things that players may choose to do, but with different "cost/value/weight" to them, the system breaks down.

And yeah. Doubly so if we allow players to choose when to take different actions with those different costs/values/weights. And yeah, we could restrict those things, in order to make our resolution system work, but then you're eliminating 90% of what makes RPG's actualy fun and interesting and differentiated from a basic strategy game. It's a solution that looks great on paper (haha!) at first, but doesn't really work when applied at an actual RPG table.

[KorvinStarmast]

Agency, IMO, should never mean certainty. I may add this to my sig if there is enough room left. :smallsmile: This concept applies very well to Blades in the Dark.

[warty goblin]

I think there's a quite interesting core to the card concept, however I rather suspect you'd need a substantially different game structure to take advantage of it. Subbing them in 1 - 1 for dice doesn't really play to its strengths, and is substituting a deterministic mechanic for a stochastic one, which has all kinds of knock on effects.

Instead, I think you'd want to use them in a much more narratively driven game. You don't play a card to hit an orc, you play a card to outright defeat the orc, and the question is then if it's worth the resource cost. Maybe you can negotiate or sneak past for a lower cost, but with knock-on complications because the orc is still around. You might have an entire quest for getting a card capable of defeating a dragon or something. You'd also need some sort of mechanic for hand refreshing, something like you can redraw your discard pile any time you rest, but you lose access to the highest card until you can recover in a safe area.

You could still attach some mechanical differentiation to characters, e.g. the fighter gets +1 to any card played to fight an enemy, so he can beat a Difficulty 3 orc with only a 2, or magic items that give you additional cards that don't exhaust, and so on. I don't think you want something mega-crunchy here, rather something with a couple points of differentiation that feel evocative rather than in depth or representational.

I think you could get something that's not quite free-form, but has a lot of the flexibility of that mode, with a resource model that allows for decisions to carry real weight. Good for drama, bad for deciding to move 2 squares left to flank the Abyssal Half-Dragon Ghost-Bound Minotaur.

[kyoryu]

Instead, I think you'd want to use them in a much more narratively driven game. You don't play a card to hit an orc, you play a card to outright defeat the orc, and the question is then if it's worth the resource cost. Maybe you can negotiate or sneak past for a lower cost, but with knock-on complications because the orc is still around. You might have an entire quest for getting a card capable of defeating a dragon or something. You'd also need some sort of mechanic for hand refreshing, something like you can redraw your discard pile any time you rest, but you lose access to the highest card until you can recover in a safe area.

This is more or less how storium.com works. You get a number of cards, either strengths or weaknesses. The GM sets up obstacles, with a number of cards to resolve them. If an obstacle gets more strength cards than weakness ones, it is resolved in a good way, otherwise it is resolved in a bad way.

Each player's cards refresh when they use them all. (I think there are some bonus cards you can get that are more like 'one time things' that don't fall into that bucket).

[Vahnavoi]

Unless there is some limitation on the resource itself? Card dumping in a "reshuffle" game is often a clear easy choice. Card dumping when your Fate deck is a trim 30 cards is a very impactful choice. Maybe in this system randomly remove one card from the pool each refresh until a sufficient rest occurs? Still don't like the idea for fantasy RPG, but maybe that makes it a bit more palatable to some.

- M

I'm not sure what you're asking of me. I'm already talking about a limitation - namely limiting what actions cards can be used on, so a player can't refresh their hand by, for example, repeatedly trying to open the same door. There are innumerable other ways to limit them, but I'm chiefly interested in limitations based on what the cards are supposed to stand for: consequential game moves. As noted, equivalent rules already exist for dice-based games.

---


The problem with this is that you are (once again) discussing RPG systems by introducing concepts from non-RPG games, and typically exclusively PvP games.

And? You think rolling dice to decide an outcome was invented by or for tabletop roleplaying? Complex games, such as roleplaying games, are constructed from mixing and matching elements from other games. This includes D&D and every tabletop game following in its footsteps. D&D itself is an outgrowth of adversarial wargaming and the position of a dungeon master evolved from the position of umpire in Kriegspiel type of wargame.

So if you think looking at the wider field of games for knowledge, inspiration, mechanics etc. is a problem rather than actively searching for a solution, you make mockery of game design and every discussion about it.


When there is no referee, perfect knowledge games work great. Chess, checkers, etc. But the second you have a GM running a RPG, perfect knowledge goes out the window for the players (but not for the GM). Which is what I spoke about before. Even your response supports my problem. The GM will have to "rig" things to make this work. The GM has to decide which rolls are significant, and which are not. That very choice represents an impact to how the game itself will be played.

What about this is supposed to be about cards or perfect information? A game master, in their role as scenario designer, "rigs" the game just as much when they select the odds for die rolls. You aren't describing some unique, insurmountable problem to playing with cards - you are describing a basic game design task that has to be carried out regardless of format of number generation.


And... IMO, incorrectly focuses said game only on what the GM considers "important", and away from what the players may. It also may unfairly penalize or reward PCs based on build choices. If the GM thinks that perception and social skills are "unimportant" and thus don't require rolls/cards, then PCs who focus on such things may well feel cheated ("I spent 5 points on spot, but the GM never has me roll it, and just tells the entire party what we see").

Again, what of this is supposed to be about cards or perfect information? Every single supposedly negative effect mentioned here can happen in a dice-based game - and already happened when, for example, 5th edition D&D was designed.


The kind of system that would utilize this sort of card/hand mechanic would basically require focus purely on a "same level" basis, and most of the time that "same level" would be "combat encounters" (or some kind of "life and death" situation).

So sure. If you're the kind of GM who runs adventures via narration to the players and "ok. You encounter X, roll initiative", then this system will work perfectly. But if you want to have a more descriptive game, with more choices for PCs, and where information perceived/learned/gathered informs their choices and *those choices* then lead to encounters/conflicts, such a system will not work well at all. I lean heavily towards the latter sytle of game running.

You are pulling all of that from your posterior. We're talking about number generation. Nothing restricts number generation by cards to combat, just like nothing restricts dice rolls to that. Ditto for "life and death" situations. What you say almost makes sense if you think of the idea only in context of swapping dice for cards in contemporary D&D, but even then it's a strawman largely built on doubling down on existing fixations of the system while ignoring any other take.


I disagree. Your own post says that the way to make it work is to force a bunch of things we might normally use rolls to determine to be determined by GM fiat instead. That's absolutely 100% about trivializing all of that "other stuff" in the game. And it's not surprising really. I commented on this earlier. Not all things we roll dice for in a game session have equal weight and import. So, to make this work, you have to make each card expenditure of a given value card of equal value (otherwise, you will get players tossing low cards at low impact actions). But to do that, your propsed method is "just don't roll for anything not important". To me, that trivializes a good portion of the game. RPGs are about roleplaying. They are not exclusively combat/encounter simulators. But your solution kinda requires the latter approach.

This is a complete non-sequitur. You completely forgot that dice-based games have rules to prevent frivolous rolling. What I'm talking about is equivalent to that, not this strawman you built. Furthermore, even contemporary D&D in its own instructions says that there being a die roll at all is subject to dungeon master's authority. Get it? Die rolls don't exist to eliminate fiat, they exist by fiat, to randomly pick from a selection also existing by fiat.

None of that means players have no choice in what's important - they have as much choice as the game designers and game masters are willing to give them. It's an active game desing concern that effects all games, regardless of how they generate numbers.

If there's a strategy players would be inclined to choose that makes a game tedious & boring, a straightforward solution is to not give them that choice. Nothing limits this principle to non-combat options in a way that inherently favors combat. If you swap dice for cards in contemporary D&D, it might, but only because the system is already fixated on combat at the expense of other things. Even then, swapping dice for cards does not in any way restrict a dungeon master from designing a scenario that has less combat in it and instead focuses on carefully managing non-combat skills. In a non-combat game, the same principle would instead just keep a player from burning cards on tasks that don't move the game forward - trying to pick the same lock over and over serves as an apt example here too.

Whatever the subject matter of a game is, the actual point stands: determinism and perfect information do not necessarily yield perfect play in practice. You did nothing to refute that.

[Mordar]

I'm not sure what you're asking of me. I'm already talking about a limitation - namely limiting what actions cards can be used on, so a player can't refresh their hand by, for example, repeatedly trying to open the same door. There are innumerable other ways to limit them, but I'm chiefly interested in limitations based on what the cards are supposed to stand for: consequential game moves. As noted, equivalent rules already exist for dice-based games.

Nothing specifically being asked of you...just rumination on what could support the system if used to swap for dice in a specific game like D&D. With a really good social contract, no modifications would be necessary...but even then I think some gamepersonship could still come into play. Things like deciding to hold off on consequential game moves that don't have a directly opposed target, or can be reexplored at a later time without undue penalty (say, for instance, trying to translate that strange note on the map we found last session, or appraising that gem from the last monster's pocket, or using a spell with a variable impact or duration that isn't damage), until you need an opportunity to cycle cards.

It seems to me there was a seemingly very cool game published back in the mid 90s that had a card-based resolution system similar to this conversation as the preferred option (but also with traditional dice based resolutions systems as options) - also had a lot of troupe-centric elements. Was called "The Everlasting", and I think they got a pair of books out before they vanished like so many other indie efforts back then. Somebody else grabbed it a decade later and did a few more books I think. A quick review says that might have been random draws from the deck, but I really think there was a choice-of-cards option...

- M

[NichG]

I wonder how the discussion on cards would be different if we didn't assume a generous refresh mechanic at all. If you're out of cards, you just automatically fail any checks you would normally have to make. You can always choose not to spend a card on a check. Players each get 20 cards every short rest. NPCs/DM-controlled characters always just take 10.

Edit: Thinking about it for more than a moment, 'cripplingly punishing for martials' I think is the answer, if we're talking D&D.

[icefractal]

For reasons unrelated to agency, I'm not a fan of any mechanics that make rolling (or drawing cards, if that replaces rolling) something that must have a possible downside, or that the GM has to approve and ration.

Sometimes you just want to see if a character can do something, or how well they can do it. Even if there aren't big stakes and it isn't vital to the plot, I might still want to know, and have that answer be driven by the character's stats in the same way it would otherwise be, rather than just hand-waved.

And related to which, I don't like it when a system draws a hard line between "this is a Challenge™ where the full mechanics apply" and "this isn't". Mainly for "feel" reasons - I want climbing a tree to be handled the same way whether it's plot-significant or not, because I want to feel like I'm doing things within a fictional world more so than co-writing a story. But also because setting a clear line like that can dissuade probing / scouting tactics if they end up being just as risky as going in fully (which, TBF, might be a good thing if your goal is to get straight to the action ASAP).

[KorvinStarmast]

I want climbing a tree to be handled the same way Please, stop it.
No two trees are the same.
I began climbing trees when I was 5 years old. I was up in one last week trimming branches so that they would not hang out over the street. I am north of 60.

No Two Trees Are The Same.
Using trees as a "skill system" example is an utter, abject failure.

[icefractal]

No two fights are the same either, but yet, we manage to represent them with the same rules. To be clear, by "the same" I don't mean that all trees have the same difficulty, but - for example - climbing the same tree should be handled the same way whether it occurs during a fight or not, whether it's important to the plot or not, and whether failing has extra risk or not.

[KorvinStarmast]

To be clear, by "the same" I don't mean that all trees have the same difficulty, but - for example - climbing the same tree should be handled the same way whether it occurs during a fight or not, whether it's important to the plot or not, and whether failing has extra risk or not. Thanks for clearing that up. And that does make sense.

[kyoryu]

IDK.. It's important to understand that different players and groups may have different preferences regarding the degree of influence of decisions made. Some prefer more linear or story-driven games, while others prefer greater freedom of choice and influence on the world around them. Game engines such as Hexcrawl typically offer greater freedom and decision-making, which can be attractive to those who value deep interaction with the game world and a variety of possible story paths.

Just as a note, most "storygames" and "narrative games" lean heavily into player agency. It's only the plot-based, "traditional" games that really curtail player agency/delta in that way. In a lot of ways, storygames and narrative games are a reaction to that style of play.

[Mordar]

Just as a note, most "storygames" and "narrative games" lean heavily into player agency. It's only the plot-based, "traditional" games that really curtail player agency/delta in that way. In a lot of ways, storygames and narrative games are a reaction to that style of play.

At risk of derailing, this always flummoxes me. I haven't felt my agency curtailed *by outside forces* in any of the "traditional" games I have played. I'm curious as to what is meant here...that the social contract "forces" acceptance of the "rescue the prince, slay the queen and save the day" adventure chain when what my character really wants to do is set up a small turnip farm? (Waves wands and intones "Reductio ad absurdumium!"). I never could quite get to "rules = reduced agency".

- M

[NichG]

I think there's a high risk of talking past each-other with this terminology.

There are tables where the GM wants to tell their story, regardless of the system.
There are systems designed to help players collaboratively tell a story.

Both could be called 'story-driven games'. They're not the same thing.

[kyoryu]

At risk of derailing, this always flummoxes me. I haven't felt my agency curtailed *by outside forces* in any of the "traditional" games I have played. I'm curious as to what is meant here...that the social contract "forces" acceptance of the "rescue the prince, slay the queen and save the day" adventure chain when what my character really wants to do is set up a small turnip farm? (Waves wands and intones "Reductio ad absurdumium!"). I never could quite get to "rules = reduced agency".

- M

It's not inherently at oddds with "traditional" game systems. I've run higher-agency games for decades using traditional game systems.

It is at odds with the heavily pre-scripted adventure path style of gaming that was heavily dominant in the 90s (and is still common today)

[Easy e]

It is also really hard to write a module commercially that is NOT the "heavily pre-scripted adventure path" approach.

Not saying it can't be done, and no one has done it; it is just a lot harder.

[gbaji]

Instead, I think you'd want to use them in a much more narratively driven game. You don't play a card to hit an orc, you play a card to outright defeat the orc, and the question is then if it's worth the resource cost. Maybe you can negotiate or sneak past for a lower cost, but with knock-on complications because the orc is still around. You might have an entire quest for getting a card capable of defeating a dragon or something. You'd also need some sort of mechanic for hand refreshing, something like you can redraw your discard pile any time you rest, but you lose access to the highest card until you can recover in a safe area.

Right. You can absolutely use a mechanism like this for some very well structured narrative style games. Basically, you set up a specific number of "obstacles" and "objectives" in a scenario, and the players have a specific number of cards to use to try to navigate them. That kind of game can work, but you absolutely are sacrificing a ton of the granularity that many games (and players) tend to like in many RPGs.

I've played in games that are purely narrative in nature as well. No die rolls at all. Just improv style collective storytelling. They are fun, for a session here and there, but not much for continuity based gaming (which most folks also tend to want to do). Blending those can work, but you are committing to a very "mechanics-lite" type of game.



And? You think rolling dice to decide an outcome was invented by or for tabletop roleplaying? Complex games, such as roleplaying games, are constructed from mixing and matching elements from other games. This includes D&D and every tabletop game following in its footsteps. D&D itself is an outgrowth of adversarial wargaming and the position of a dungeon master evolved from the position of umpire in Kriegspiel type of wargame.

Yes. We took simple war games, where each chit represented a unit of some kind, and maybe had 2-3 "stats" on it, and we ran a battle with a whole map full of them, to each player playing one "unit" which was a single character, with dozens of stats on the sheet, and then invented a boatload of rules to manage all of those stats, abilities, skills, weapons, armor, spells, etc.

Sure. We can toss all of that out and go back to simple resolution methods if we want. But we are "tossing all that out". When the only resolution decision is "did I hit or miss with this unit?", you could use some kind of "fixed deck of cards" for your mechanical resolution methogology if you want (and it would be some interesting strategy actually). That works in a wargame. It does not work in a RPG. The moment you introduce elements into the game that have different weight to the overall result (but that people care about anyway), you have to have a system to manage that. With a single hand of cards, each card has the same value (relative to the number printed on it), but the actions you are resolving do not. That breaks the system.


So if you think looking at the wider field of games for knowledge, inspiration, mechanics etc. is a problem rather than actively searching for a solution, you make mockery of game design and every discussion about it.

Honestly? What makes a mockery of "game design" is insisting that game design differences don't result in differences in how they are played, or how people want to play them, or strategies used in those game, and yeah... what resolution machanics work well in those different game designs.

I'm actually pointing at very specific game desgin elements in RPGs, and discussing how changing the resolution methodolog might affect that, and how it would affect play of such a game, and how it would affect scenario design as well. I don't think anything I've posted is a "mockery". What I'm doing is (at least IMO) good game analysis. Not every game is the same. Ergo, not every rule idea will work equally well.



What about this is supposed to be about cards or perfect information? A game master, in their role as scenario designer, "rigs" the game just as much when they select the odds for die rolls. You aren't describing some unique, insurmountable problem to playing with cards - you are describing a basic game design task that has to be carried out regardless of format of number generation.

Again, what of this is supposed to be about cards or perfect information? Every single supposedly negative effect mentioned here can happen in a dice-based game - and already happened when, for example, 5th edition D&D was designed.


Huh? I"m confused. I was making a distinctin between a game like Chess and a game like D&D. Yes. In D&D, the GM sets and knows what the difficulty is for each thing in the game. But the players do not. This is in sharp contrast to a game like chess, or checkers, where the players have perfect knowledge. Both players see the same board, and thus nothing is hidden.

Even in games where some knowledge is hidden (like say poker), you know exactly how many of each value of card are in the deck, and both players have the same amount of information (they see the same number of cards, even if their specific view is different). These are radcially different game concepts than the player/GM dynamic in a RPG.



You are pulling all of that from your posterior. We're talking about number generation. Nothing restricts number generation by cards to combat, just like nothing restricts dice rolls to that. Ditto for "life and death" situations. What you say almost makes sense if you think of the idea only in context of swapping dice for cards in contemporary D&D, but even then it's a strawman largely built on doubling down on existing fixations of the system while ignoring any other take.

Great! Give me an example of how you'd design a RPG in which fixed card hands would be used (as proposed), but where the GM would not have to significantly reduce the number of resolution attempts just to "things that matter". Then, for fun, tell me exactly what criteria the GM will be using to determine what "things that matter" are.

Whether that is "combat" or "life and death" (or something else) is irrelevant. It will always have to be "just a small set of critical things that the GM has decided are important for resolving the scenario". Otherwise, we're not really playing a game.

And. As I've stated numerous times, you *can* run and play a game like that. But it's not going to be the kind of game that most RPG players actually want to play. We can also discuss why that is, if you wish. But just insisting that it isn't true, over and over, isn't terribly helpful.


This is a complete non-sequitur. You completely forgot that dice-based games have rules to prevent frivolous rolling. What I'm talking about is equivalent to that, not this strawman you built. Furthermore, even contemporary D&D in its own instructions says that there being a die roll at all is subject to dungeon master's authority. Get it? Die rolls don't exist to eliminate fiat, they exist by fiat, to randomly pick from a selection also existing by fiat.

Dice based games like yahtzee? Sure. You only get to roll dice when it's time to roll dice. That's the point of such games. That's not what we're discussing here though.

The point of RPGs is that the players are playing characters, and are free to do anything with those characters that they want, within the constrants of the game setting itself. If I want to have my character decide to juggle chainsaws, just because I feel like it, I should be able to do it. Even if that's not a "plot element" to be resolved in the GM's scenario. If I decide to go "off script" and run around picking pockets in town, or set up a high stakes gambling session, or challenge some random person to a footrace, I should be free to do those things with my character, and the game rules/mechanics need to be able to handle those PC choices. This is not a strawman, it's literally what makes a roleplaying game a roleplaying game.

The only way to make the kind of fixed card hand mechanism work as written, requires effectively disallowing players from doing any of those things. Or, as some have suggested, just not allowing cards to be used (always take 10, always succeed, handwave outcoomes, etc). But that requires that the GM only allow those cards to be used on a smallish set of things the GM has decided they can be used for.


None of that means players have no choice in what's important - they have as much choice as the game designers and game masters are willing to give them. It's an active game desing concern that effects all games, regardless of how they generate numbers.

Sure. But... as I just pointed out, why on earth pick a resolution mechanic that severely restricts those choices? Die rolling doesn't, because dice have no memory. That's the whole point of using dice. Intentionally using a mechanism that does have a memory creates massive problems in a RPG.

As I've said repeatedly, the only way to prevent players from gaming the system is to place strict restrictions on when the cards can be played. And that, in turn, places massive restrictions on all free choices the PCs can actually make in the game itself. It becomes a severe form of railroading.


If there's a strategy players would be inclined to choose that makes a game tedious & boring, a straightforward solution is to not give them that choice.

The issue isn't about something being tedious or boring. The issue is that players tend to want to do things that aren't part of the GM's adventure script. That's certainly not "tedious or boring" to them, since they're the ones who want to do those things. Maybe... and this may be a crazy idea here...let the players do what they want to do? If that includes "spurious chainsaw juggling", then so be it. If they want to search the bushes for bad guys, let them do it.

But, having allowed the players to do what they want, when they want, you can't enforce the "you have one specific set of cards to use to resolve all of the challenges in my scenario" anymore. So yeah... the better approach is "don't use a game mechanic that restricts player agency arbitrarily". And the reallity is that "random determination of each and every action" allows for any action/attempt the players want to do, at any time, with zero restrictions needed. Anything based on non-random, or "select from a set" resolution methods introduce problems. And those problems ultimately can themselves only be resolved by restricting player choices.

Which, sure, works fine if we're playing a board game. Or card game. Or dice game. it does *not* work well with a roleplaying game though.


Whatever the subject matter of a game is, the actual point stands: determinism and perfect information do not necessarily yield perfect play in practice. You did nothing to refute that.

Well, who's pulling out the strawman now?

I will totally own up to not refuting something that is utterly unreleated to the point I'm making.

"perfect play" tends to only matter in strategy type games. In RPGs, the focus tends to be on "fun play" instead. Very few players approach RPGs as a "what's the most cost effective way to <achieve the scennario objecitves>". Most players are more like "Hey. this is what I want to do with my character. And oh... look, the GM has placed some interesting things in the game world for me to do too!". Heaven forbid we let the players... play.


For reasons unrelated to agency, I'm not a fan of any mechanics that make rolling (or drawing cards, if that replaces rolling) something that must have a possible downside, or that the GM has to approve and ration.

Sometimes you just want to see if a character can do something, or how well they can do it. Even if there aren't big stakes and it isn't vital to the plot, I might still want to know, and have that answer be driven by the character's stats in the same way it would otherwise be, rather than just hand-waved.

Exactly. My players are constantly doing things "unrelated to the plot" of my adventure. Rogue characters sometimes decide to pick pockets out of the blue. The trade focused guy may decide to barter for the cost of a meal at the Inn for some reason. See "juggling chainsaws" example above. The players are roleplaying their characters. This means that they want to do things while playing. And quite often those "other things" have nothing to do with the adventure they are on. Someone decides, out of the blue, to try to seduce a fellow tavern guest. Someone decides, out of the blue, to see if they can spy on some random group of people.

And, as I pointed out earlier, even if these thigsn aren't super significant, you still have to use the same mechanics to resolve them that you'd use for things that are. Otherwise, you are telling your players which things actually are significant. So... I can figure out which building the bad guys are in, by walking around town, going to each building and saying "I sneak inside to see what's in there", and the GM handwaves each away with "Nothing interesting", but then when he says "Ok. What card value are you playing"... now I know this is "plot relevant".

I can literally think of a dozen different and really obnoxious ways to totally game such a card system as a player. I don't want to play that way, and I don't want my players feeling that this is how they should play. As I said above, if we're doing very very simple narrative style play with a super simplistic "spend your resources wisely" style game system? I can see it. But that's "barely" what I'd call a RPG. The moment we introduce the concept that other things exist in the game seting other than the GMs plot? We need to allow the PCs to do things with the "whole rest of the world". So yeah. Random rolls work well for this.


And related to which, I don't like it when a system draws a hard line between "this is a Challenge™ where the full mechanics apply" and "this isn't". Mainly for "feel" reasons - I want climbing a tree to be handled the same way whether it's plot-significant or not, because I want to feel like I'm doing things within a fictional world more so than co-writing a story. But also because setting a clear line like that can dissuade probing / scouting tactics if they end up being just as risky as going in fully (which, TBF, might be a good thing if your goal is to get straight to the action ASAP).

Yup. I kinda highlighted a flaw with failing to do this, just above. Even if the GM is just handwaving stuff away (one of the proposals mentioned in this thread), that very method also allows for players to game the system.

Um... And it can be abused in other ways too. What exactly is "trivial"? So... your scenario doesn't include any players deciding to "play games at the casino and bankrupt the house and take over", so... if I decide to do that, I just automatically succeed? Automatically fail? Or I can try it? Which does the GM do? If I can attempt it, and use a card, then I can use stuff like this to dump cards.

Sure we can maybe push back on absurd things. But what if they are reasonable things, but should also entaill "reasonable risk"? IMO, if a PC decides they want to break into the local bank and steal some cash, they can try to do that. It's their choice. There are risks and rewards. And I'm going to want to use a resolution methodology for that which is consistent to the one I use for everything else in my game. So, where is the point at which the GM decides "this is trivial"? So if I'm using my hide/sneak to break into a bank, that's important, but if I'm using it to sneak past old man johnson to visit with his daughter, it's not?

It's the same skills. Just use the same methodology to resovlve them. Let the risks/rewards sort themselves out.

[Vahnavoi]

With a single hand of cards, each card has the same value (relative to the number printed on it), but the actions you are resolving do not. That breaks the system.

This is the second time you've expressed this idea. You don't seem to realize it comes from nowhere. We're talking of a method of number generation - just like any given result of a die roll might lead to a different total based on which action and hence which modifiers are appended to it, nothing stops a number on a card from being used the same way and the same card hence having multiple totals it can achieve. Nothing about doing so "breaks the system". It just means a player has to think and choose between different uses of the same card - a basic principle in card games, co-operative ones included. Nothing you say, anywhere, adequately explains why this would not work in a roleplaying game.


Well, who's pulling out the strawman now?

I will totally own up to not refuting something that is utterly unreleated to the point I'm making.

"perfect play" tends to only matter in strategy type games. In RPGs, the focus tends to be on "fun play" instead. Very few players approach RPGs as a "what's the most cost effective way to <achieve the scennario objecitves>". Most players are more like "Hey. this is what I want to do with my character. And oh... look, the GM has placed some interesting things in the game world for me to do too!". Heaven forbid we let the players... play.

You once again miss the point and start arguing about something unrelated. People can, and regularly do, play perfect information games for "fun". That includes "fun" of the sort "hey there are some interesting in this game, what happens if I do this?" for the exact reason I already explained: theoretical perfect information and determinism don't necessarily yield perfect play. That depends on game complexity, and complexity class for open cards is open ended. In other words, it's possible to set up a game scenario so complex that the best way to figure out how it would end is just to play through it. And you know what trait would help in setting that up? Having multiple possible actions of different values for each card. Yes, the very same trait you claim would "break the system" would in fact help make a system that has qualities you deem fit for a roleplaying game.

That's how badly you are off.

The rest is you failing to grasp the difference between "a game master shouldn't allow tedious & boring strategies that only exist to secure a card refresh" and "a game master shouldn't allow players to do anything of their own volition, ever".

[Mordar]

This is the second time you've expressed this idea. You don't seem to realize it comes from nowhere. We're talking of a method of number generation - just like any given result of a die roll might lead to a different total based on which action and hence which modifiers are appended to it, nothing stops a number on a card from being used the same way and the same card hence having multiple totals it can achieve. Nothing about doing so "breaks the system". It just means a player has to think and choose between different uses of the same card - a basic principle in card games, co-operative ones included. Nothing you say, anywhere, adequately explains why this would not work in a roleplaying game.

I read this point as "using the 1-card on a save-or-die equivalent" versus "using the 1-card on a search of the bathroom for a hidden gun" versus "using the 1-card on a search to find the bathroom during a dinner party". Same card (the "1"), three different potentially legitimate options, three radically different risk/reward profiles for the card, even if your save bonus, search bonus, and knowledge: residential interior architecture are all exactly the same, or hugely different. It isn't the final resolution number that matters, it is the impact of that lowest possible addition + base score on the game/character that matters.


The rest is you failing to grasp the difference between "a game master shouldn't allow tedious & boring strategies that only exist to secure a card refresh" and "a game master shouldn't allow players to do anything of their own volition, ever".

But without going to the extreme pole, what if I am good at "gaming" the system with legitimate and relevant skill uses that allow me to refresh cards so often that I am nearly never forced to play the low value cards in a high leverage situation? Am I beardy for gaming the system? Am I blocked from attempting the actions? Is this an accepted weakness/trade off? Or do we only apply it in games where we rely on character skill trivializing 90ish percent of the actions most D20 games require rolls (by category, not by frequency)?

Optimally, what is the GM using in this system? Also cards? Do we ever get the opportunity for clever opposed card use sub-systems?

- M

[Vahnavoi]

I read this point as "using the 1-card on a save-or-die equivalent" versus "using the 1-card on a search of the bathroom for a hidden gun" versus "using the 1-card on a search to find the bathroom during a dinner party". Same card (the "1"), three different potentially legitimate options, three radically different risk/reward profiles for the card, even if your save bonus, search bonus, and knowledge: residential interior architecture are all exactly the same, or hugely different. It isn't the final resolution number that matters, it is the impact of that lowest possible addition + base score on the game/character that matters.

No-one's confused or arguing against that. The out-of-nowhere argument is gbaji's addition that this is somehow unacceptable and that in order to use open cards, each card would need to only have uses of equal value. But there's nothing pathological about a card's value being dependent on the context it's played in.


But without going to the extreme pole, what if I am good at "gaming" the system with legitimate and relevant skill uses that allow me to refresh cards so often that I am nearly never forced to play the low value cards in a high leverage situation?

You are falling in the trap where you don't realize that what you describe as being "good at gaming the system" is just being good at playing a game. This isn't pathological. The entire point of my response to gbaji's "perfect play" tangent was that it makes no sense to fear this - somebody playing well - before-the-fact.

Consider: when picking between new games, do you usually go "wait, we shouldn't pick that game, one of us might be so good at it that they just win!" ? Doubly so if you're playing co-op and them winning would also mean you winning?


Am I beardy for gaming the system?

No. Again: the complexity class for open cards is open ended. If a player gets good at solving some subset of scenarios, it is in principle always possible to make a harder scenario where they can't do so well. The practical limit is not set by the system, it's set by intelligence and skill of the scenario designer. That was the point of comparing Tic Tac Toe and Chess. They are both positional deterministic perfect information games played on a grid. The former can be played perfectly by a child, the latter might not be able to be played perfectly by any human.

Alternatively, consider the field of Chess puzzles: does the fact that some people are very good at solving such puzzles mean that one should never be used as a game obstacle in a roleplaying game?


Am I blocked from attempting the actions?

Do these actions fit the earlier quote about tedious & boring optimal play? If yes, then yes - because by having that attempt blocked, you have to think of something else, and now the game's more likely to be interesting again for you also. Effectively, we take a puzzle you already solved & change it a bit so now it's a new one with a new solution.

But if not, then not - you aren't doing anything wrong, you are playing the game as it was meant to be played and being good at it. Consider: why would the individual actions in this scenario even stand out to a game master as something unusual?


Is this an accepted weakness/trade off?

It's an acceptable trade-off - emphasis on free choice by players and player strategy, at the cost of independent random events and the possibility of even the perfect strategy losing some % of the time.


Or do we only apply it in games where we rely on character skill trivializing 90ish percent of the actions most D20 games require rolls (by category, not by frequency)?

There is no reason to limit application for such reasons. Consider: your question is akin to asking "do we limit application of black paint to fences that are already part black?" The answer is no - the prior quality of the system isn't determinant, the quality after the change is. You paint a fence black if it's better as black - you toss d20s away from an d20 game and replace them with cards if you get a new, interesting game that way.


Optimally, what is the GM using in this system? Also cards? Do we ever get the opportunity for clever opposed card use sub-systems?

- M

It is impossible to answer "optimally" anything. I've been presuming that game master plays cards in the same manner as players for sake of simplicity, but there's innumerable other ways to set this up. NichG, above, suggested a different version where game master's character always play 10. As a quick comparison between just these two:

When game master also plays open cards, they always have a choice of game strategy, and the players can see which choices and even force the game master's hand somewhat. One aspect of this that I already noted is that a game master has capability to adjust game difficulty on the fly by changing how they play their cards.

When a game master always plays 10, this makes them considerably more passive during play, and difficulty of game scenario is set more firmly during scenario design phase.

Other changes also happen because the ranges of numbers on the game master's side now have a different floor and ceiling, but these are hard to figure out without actually playing.

[KorvinStarmast]

You once again miss the point and start arguing about something unrelated. People can, and regularly do, play perfect information games for "fun". . I think that Pandemic (board game) is one such. It's co-op.

[Mordar]

No-one's confused or arguing against that. The out-of-nowhere argument is gbaji's addition that this is somehow unacceptable and that in order to use open cards, each card would need to only have uses of equal value. But there's nothing pathological about a card's value being dependent on the context it's played in.



You are falling in the trap where you don't realize that what you describe as being "good at gaming the system" is just being good at playing a game. This isn't pathological. The entire point of my response to gbaji's "perfect play" tangent was that it makes no sense to fear this - somebody playing well - before-the-fact.

Consider: when picking between new games, do you usually go "wait, we shouldn't pick that game, one of us might be so good at it that they just win!" ? Doubly so if you're playing co-op and them winning would also mean you winning?



No. Again: the complexity class for open cards is open ended. If a player gets good at solving some subset of scenarios, it is in principle always possible to make a harder scenario where they can't do so well. The practical limit is not set by the system, it's set by intelligence and skill of the scenario designer. That was the point of comparing Tic Tac Toe and Chess. They are both positional deterministic perfect information games played on a grid. The former can be played perfectly by a child, the latter might not be able to be played perfectly by any human.

Alternatively, consider the field of Chess puzzles: does the fact that some people are very good at solving such puzzles mean that one should never be used as a game obstacle in a roleplaying game?



Do these actions fit the earlier quote about tedious & boring optimal play? If yes, then yes - because by having that attempt blocked, you have to think of something else, and now the game's more likely to be interesting again for you also. Effectively, we take a puzzle you already solved & change it a bit so now it's a new one with a new solution.

But if not, then not - you aren't doing anything wrong, you are playing the game as it was meant to be played and being good at it. Consider: why would the individual actions in this scenario even stand out to a game master as something unusual?



It's an acceptable trade-off - emphasis on free choice by players and player strategy, at the cost of independent random events and the possibility of even the perfect strategy losing some % of the time.



There is no reason to limit application for such reasons. Consider: your question is akin to asking "do we limit application of black paint to fences that are already part black?" The answer is no - the prior quality of the system isn't determinant, the quality after the change is. You paint a fence black if it's better as black - you toss d20s away from an d20 game and replace them with cards if you get a new, interesting game that way.



It is impossible to answer "optimally" anything. I've been presuming that game master plays cards in the same manner as players for sake of simplicity, but there's innumerable other ways to set this up. NichG, above, suggested a different version where game master's character always play 10. As a quick comparison between just these two:

When game master also plays open cards, they always have a choice of game strategy, and the players can see which choices and even force the game master's hand somewhat. One aspect of this that I already noted is that a game master has capability to adjust game difficulty on the fly by changing how they play their cards.

When a game master always plays 10, this makes them considerably more passive during play, and difficulty of game scenario is set more firmly during scenario design phase.

Other changes also happen because the ranges of numbers on the game master's side now have a different floor and ceiling, but these are hard to figure out without actually playing.

No thought that anything I was proposing was pathological or otherwise negative on its face - just confirming the intent. If the proposed game system is one where cycling cards is considered acceptable according to Hoyle that establishes the perception of the game.

"Optimally" was not intended in the "how do I maximize the effect of this to benefit X", rather, what would *your* preference be for how the GM manages resolution, particularly since they would have something better approaching "perfect" knowledge. You responded with same sub-system for both PCs and GMs. This is the information I wanted, so communication occurred.

I think the "play 10" rule is perhaps good for mooks, while open cards for leaders and above...but that does create the "problem" of mooks always succeeding/failing certain actions against certain characters. If acceptable, I think the mook/non-mook distinction can be valuable.

- M

[gbaji]

This is the second time you've expressed this idea.

At least that many times.... :smallsigh:


You don't seem to realize it comes from nowhere.

Please don't tell me where my own statements come from. This is not from "nowhere". It comes from a very clearly described set of gaming concepts, which I've already explained (at least twice now!).

Ignoring what I wrote, and then just dismissing it as "coming from nowhere" is not very productive. If you disagree with the clear and well written explanations I've arleady given, then please feel free to do so.


We're talking of a method of number generation - just like any given result of a die roll might lead to a different total based on which action and hence which modifiers are appended to it, nothing stops a number on a card from being used the same way and the same card hence having multiple totals it can achieve. Nothing about doing so "breaks the system". It just means a player has to think and choose between different uses of the same card - a basic principle in card games, co-operative ones included. Nothing you say, anywhere, adequately explains why this would not work in a roleplaying game.

From a game perspective, there is a radical difference between randomly generating a result each time, and picking a number from a predefined set.

The largest difference between those two is in exactly the fact that the player is "picking" the number to use each time, from that set. This introduces an entire new "mini-game" involving the choice of when to use any given numbered card that the player has in their hand. Yes. The player "has to think and choose" which number to play. But... and this is critically important the player also gets to think and choose a number to play. This creates a layer of strategy in the playing of the cards, that does not exist when randomly generating numbers.

This creates a problem in a RPG, because not everything you are using the cards for are of equal weight/effect in the game itself. Most strategy/card games avoid this problem by either not having different weight outcomes *or* limiting when the players may play cards. If I'm playing a trick taking card game, when I choose to play a low or high card in suit, or when I choose to play trump, or not, is based on my guess as to other players hands, and what they may be forced to play in response. We may even say that the value of each trick may vary (cause they do in some games), but I'm both allowed and required to play one and only one card in each hand, and the rules as to what card(s) I must play must be followed. That's how the game restricts play to make it work. Most trick taking cards games do not work if you allow players to play any card they want, instead of requiring them to play in suit (and some go further and require playing a higher card if you can take the suit, and even requiring trump be played if possible, higher trump if possible, etc).

The problem a RPG creates is that the players can play cards "between hands" in many cases. There is nothing preventing my character from attempting to use a skill at any given time, and since each use of a skill requires a resolution, that should require playing a card. Also, the outcome of some resolutions are significantly different. There's a massive difference between whether I make or do not make a sense motive skill attempt versus making a save against a deadly poison. I fail one, and maybe don't get confirmation about an NPC that I already suspect anyway. I fail the other, and my character maybe dies. So the "strategy" becomes about using your low cards on things that aren't important, and saving up a number of high cards for use when doing something that is important (like the big fight with the bbeg).

The only way to solve that problem is to restrict the card play in the RPG in the same way you'd restrict it in any other card game. But, as I and several other posters have pointed out, this can significantly impair player agency. RPGs are supposed to be free flowing and open ended. PCs are supposed to be allowed to do anything they want to (try to) do. If I want to try to seduce the bar wench, I can try to do that. If I decide to pick that merchant's pocket, I can try to do that. If I want to sneak into the back room of the inn and steal some of their higher quality ale that they're hoading, I can do that. If I want to try to run a three card monte game on the street, I can do that. There are endless number of things I may choose to have my character do at any given time, and many/most of them require some sort of skill roll to determine if they succeed. Every single one of those things can be "gamed" if you are using the "pick from a hand of cards" method of resolution.


It's also just a really poor way to simulate outcomes like this anyway. I mean, even setting aside the game theory stuff. The idea that I may choose to do poorly in my attempt to pick this lock, that means I"m going to be better at hitting people with my sword in the fight that happens afterwards, is just... strange. A methodology like this works if we assume that the player has a fixed set of resources that are being expended in some single specific way. But that's usually defined as "in game" resources. So if I have a fixed amount of "stuff", and can use that "stuff" to do things, then I may choose how much "stuff" I use. I could see something like this used in a cyber type game, to simulate hacking. You have a specific set of resources/tools to use in each "session", and you expend them along the way (perhaps even in this case with your various hacking skills determining which types and number of cards are in your hand when you start the attempt).

Heck. I could see this method used for a number of "one session" type events. You start a battle, and draw a hand of cards, which you use for that battle. You sneak into the castle and draw a set of cards to use for that attempt to sneak. It's still a bit squirrely, but as long as the entire set of cards are used to represent a pool of "how good are you at doing this one specific thing you are doing right now?" resources, I suppose it would work. Maybe (honestly can also be gamed quite a bit too).

But as a full replacement for just rolling dice in a RPG? Not seeing that at all. Again, because the moment the same set of cards are used to determine if you can pick that lock, or spot that enemy hiding in the shadows, or bluff someone, or resist poision, or hit an opponent in battle, you are mixing and matching up too many different things. I could maybe see the logic of saying that if you save your energy during one part of the fight, you may have more later (which could be abstracted as a single "battle deck" for a single fight). But I see no logic to explain why doing poorly at sneaking up to the gate and then bluffing the guard at the door, makes you statistically better at fighting him and his friends later. Yet... that's exactly what this system would do. Worse, it would effectively make players make choices, not based on what makes sense in the game, but based on what makes sense based on their current set of cards.

And I'm still struggling to see how this at all resolves things "better" than just rolling dice. We've already discussed the idea of using some kind of "karma" points, to give characters a "save my bacon" type effect, used just when really needed. I think that's a great idea, if folks are worried about "one bad die roll kills my character" type situations. I just don't think that the whole "play cards from a hand" mechanic is needed to solve that problem, and it introduces a massive set of additional problems if used.


You once again miss the point and start arguing about something unrelated. People can, and regularly do, play perfect information games for "fun". That includes "fun" of the sort "hey there are some interesting in this game, what happens if I do this?"

The "fun" in strategy games is almost exclusively about it being "fun" when you do well with your strategy though. No one moves a piece on a chess board because "My horsey wants to hang out with your queen" (well, maybe very young kids do). And sure. I can absolutely put point cards into my opponents winning tricks in a card game "for fun", but I"m pretty sure that's not going to make my partners game "fun" for them.


for the exact reason I already explained: theoretical perfect information and determinism don't necessarily yield perfect play. That depends on game complexity, and complexity class for open cards is open ended. In other words, it's possible to set up a game scenario so complex that the best way to figure out how it would end is just to play through it. And you know what trait would help in setting that up? Having multiple possible actions of different values for each card. Yes, the very same trait you claim would "break the system" would in fact help make a system that has qualities you deem fit for a roleplaying game.

Only if our actual objective is to make "gaming the cards" more of a game than actually playing the RPG itself. You are correct that if "playing my cards correctly" is the objective of the game, and we reward players for doing that well, then this method opens up all sorts of additional strategies. But those strategies "break" the game if it's about "immersion in the RPG setting itself". Flushing my low cards on unimportant side tasks is absolutely a winning strategy in the mini-game we've invented here. But that also totally breaks the actual game we're all playing. Again. It make zero sense that me failing at a minor task now makes me better at an important one later on. And sure, if that's the rules we're using in the game, then that becomes the strategy for winning.

I'm just saying that this isn't what *should* be the "winning strategy" at all. But now it is. I find that to be a problem.


That's how badly you are off.

I'm not really seeing it. It feels more to me like you are "off" in terms of what you think a RPG game actually is. Or maybe we're just using our terminology differently. Hard to tell. I really does feel like you and I are placing completely different weight on completely different things when it comes to what we think makes "a good RPG". That may simply be an unresolvable difference.


The rest is you failing to grasp the difference between "a game master shouldn't allow tedious & boring strategies that only exist to secure a card refresh" and "a game master shouldn't allow players to do anything of their own volition, ever".

I'm not failing to grasp that you keep saying this. I've responded to this exact point (again, multiple times). I suspect the first problem is that what you label "tedious and boring" is exactly the things I'm saying make a RPG a RPG in the first place. The second problem is that you have yet to describe exactly what you would define as "tedious and boring". And how would you, as the GM, prevent players from taking those actions, or at least prevent them from using any of the existing game mechanics for resolving those actions?

You say those are two different things, but I can't see any way to achieve the first without also running afoul of the second. What do you do if the player wants to "do something of their own volition" that you (the GM) judge to be "tedious and boring"? Cause I can sit here all day long listing things that I and other players do all the time with our characters in the game, that I"m reasonably certain you would have to either label as "tedious and boring" and disallow *or* allow us to do (which brings us to the "flush low cards" problem).

I've listed off numerous actions PCs might take at any time, in any RPG session in this and previous posts. Please let me know which you would label as "tedious and boring", and would disallow and which you would allow.

[warty goblin]

Card cycling is not a hard problem to solve at a basic level, because at its core it's just spell slots. So just have your hand refresh on a rest or some equivalent mechanic. If you run out, you can only do stuff that's under your passive skill level for whatever it is. Which seems limiting, but is fundamentally just equivalent to not being able to cast Magic Missile if you don't have any first level + spells left, or being out of mana in a mana based system. It just uses the same fundamental resource mechanic for every interaction. If more granularity is required, you can pretty easily have decks for physical, mental and magical cards, which allows for easy character differentiation as well.

[Mordar]

Card cycling is not a hard problem to solve at a basic level, because at its core it's just spell slots. So just have your hand refresh on a rest or some equivalent mechanic. If you run out, you can only do stuff that's under your passive skill level for whatever it is. Which seems limiting, but is fundamentally just equivalent to not being able to cast Magic Missile if you don't have any first level + spells left, or being out of mana in a mana based system. It just uses the same fundamental resource mechanic for every interaction. If more granularity is required, you can pretty easily have decks for physical, mental and magical cards, which allows for easy character differentiation as well.

Not hard to solve, but does merit significant consideration. Listening for the guards, swinging a club, sneaking along a passageway - these aren't things that should be as limited as a magic spell slot. Spell slots are limits on magic because of the potency of magic, so it is a bit of a hard sell for me to limit basic actions in the same fashion, particularly in a d20 system.

However, a "bonus card" system would probably benefit from this quite a bit...you get X cards to use between long rests, you can use a single card to add its value to a d20 roll (decide after the roll is made). Once used it is discarded and your "hand" does not refresh until a long rest. Maintains full action agency, lets you have an method to try to offset "bad roll oops I died!" or "cinematic character moment, oops I sucked instead!". Doesn't eliminate chance, but provides heroes with a bit more control. Also opens some good special ability options (like adding extra cards, or being able to claw back a discard, or giving someone else a bonus when they use a card...etc).

- M

[kyoryu]

Card cycling is not a hard problem to solve at a basic level, because at its core it's just spell slots. So just have your hand refresh on a rest or some equivalent mechanic. If you run out, you can only do stuff that's under your passive skill level for whatever it is. Which seems limiting, but is fundamentally just equivalent to not being able to cast Magic Missile if you don't have any first level + spells left, or being out of mana in a mana based system. It just uses the same fundamental resource mechanic for every interaction. If more granularity is required, you can pretty easily have decks for physical, mental and magical cards, which allows for easy character differentiation as well.

I think that most presumptions are basically "cards refresh when you run out". Having them not refresh, and having them always represent capabilities above baseline definitely is a solution - making sure that you can't just "burn" cards on inconsequential actions is another solution (either by prohibition or making sure that no actions are "inconsequential")

Using cards on things you care less about should be intended gameplay. The boring extreme of this is "always burn every bad card on an inconsequential action so I always have all of my good cards available for things I care about". That should be avoided - you can't necessarily prevent every weird strategy, but you can prevent obvious situations where there's a blatantly obvious and essentially free degenerate strategy to bypass the intended game mechanics.

[gbaji]

Not hard to solve, but does merit significant consideration. Listening for the guards, swinging a club, sneaking along a passageway - these aren't things that should be as limited as a magic spell slot. Spell slots are limits on magic because of the potency of magic, so it is a bit of a hard sell for me to limit basic actions in the same fashion, particularly in a d20 system.

Well, and having the cards only refresh on a long rest (or similar) puts some character types in an odd situation. Do I use my out of combat skills to try to do "difficult things" (ie: that can't just be a "you take 20 and succeed"), knowing that this means that when/if (let's face it, it's usually "when") I get into combat, I'll get pasted. It puts a real damper on running skill based characters, since one character doing the scouting/sneaking/pilfering/whatever is usually enough for the party's needs, but it's not like that character disappears into a bubble of safety when a combat situation comes along. Some events will happen that you "Must engage in", and the PCs will want to (need to?) use cards for those situations. Heck. Would you even have the option of not using a card for a combat action attempt? Which also creates problems if we can't refresh the cards when we run out, since some combats may very well last long enough to run everyone out of cards. Heck. A fighter with high skill and ability to attack multiple times a round usuing a full attack is now burning through cards super fast (with diminishing returns, so maybe he should just not do that?).

I suppose I could play my own devil's advocate here and observe that you could so something like this, but you'd basically have to build the entire game system around this mechanic. And in that game, we could propose that this works since each character gets a fixed number of "significant things they can attempt to do per time period", so it is maybe well balanced as well. But IMO, you can't just replace rolling a D20 in an existing game, with a set of cards with the numbers one thorugh twenty on them and call it a day.

There's also the question of "what are we really doing here anyway?". Remember that this started with a question about how to resolve "one bad die roll at a critical time, screws my character" issues. Moving all the way to "completely rebuild our own game system to resolve everything by using a fixed set of per-rest resources" is so far far far beyond that requirement, tbat I feel like we've lost the point here. And anything less than such significant modifications to the games we are playing now, (again IMO) creates more problems than the one we're trying to solve in the first place.

Most games already have "per time period" feats/abilities/spells that the characters get to use. There's already the concept that the numerical values on the sheets for attempts to do various things is the "normal level of activity available to everyone" without expending any special resources, with those other things being exceptional things they can do above and beyond that. Replacing the normal stuff with similar rules as is used for the exceptional stuff, seems (again) like we've gone off into the weeds. And let's not forget that this proposal was in response to the "how do you avoid card flushing and resetting of hands" problem if we just use the cards exactly as replacements for die rolling. Which.... yeah. Puts us back into "we're not really playing the same game anymore" territory.

Possible to do something like this? Sure. Is it worth doing? Probably not. Not when there are much easier solutions to the actual problem we started out trying to solve.



However, a "bonus card" system would probably benefit from this quite a bit...you get X cards to use between long rests, you can use a single card to add its value to a d20 roll (decide after the roll is made). Once used it is discarded and your "hand" does not refresh until a long rest. Maintains full action agency, lets you have an method to try to offset "bad roll oops I died!" or "cinematic character moment, oops I sucked instead!". Doesn't eliminate chance, but provides heroes with a bit more control. Also opens some good special ability options (like adding extra cards, or being able to claw back a discard, or giving someone else a bonus when they use a card...etc).

Yeah. I think stuff like that can work fine. I think I'd still caution against just dropping this into an existing system though (without some serious thought). As I said above, most systems already grant "per time period" abilities/feats/spells/whatever. Those things already represent things you can do "above and beyond" the norm. You'd have to be especially careful if there are classes in the game you are playing that already have "per time" abilities that allow them to do things like reroll things, or get big bonuses with specific sets of skills, etc.

But yeah. It's something that could be implemented. And I suppose it depends on how "swingy" the normal action resolution system is already. If "one bad die roll really screws you" is something that happens regularly, then maybe you'll need a decent quantity of "save my bacon" stuff available. Um... Honestly, I'd look at reducing whatever is causing that in the game instead, but that's just me. But this can be very game system and setting (and sometimes just GMing style) dependent.


For me personally? If I wanted to implement some kind of safety net system to avoid the "I rolled poorly and died" situation, I'd be focusing just on that, and trying to avoid affecting any other game play elements. I'd implement something that was much much more rare than a hand of cards. I mentioned something like karma/luck points. You get like 3 maximum you can bank. You get one upon successful completion of an entire adventure. These are absolute "get out of jail free" cards, but you only want to use them in exactly the "I'm going to die if I don't" situations. Something like that would have minimal impact on the overall play of the game, allow for "save my bacon" situations, but still have a decent "herioc feel" to it (the gods smile on you as a result of your past deeds). Also, something this rare/limited would not take over the entire rest of the game system, but work as an adjuct to it.

Suppose it entirely depends on how often this sort of situation comes up. But, as I mentioned above, if this is happening in your game so often that you feel the need to hand a handful of cards for each PC to use each rest period, then maybe there are other problems with the encounter balance in your game that you should consider addressing first. The PCs should be able to handle the events in your game by using just the stuff on their character sheets (and perhaps a bit of ingenuity as well). If they are coming up short all the time, there are better ways to solve that then "we'll just make the PCS more powerful/capable".

[Darth Credence]

There's also the question of "what are we really doing here anyway?". Remember that this started with a question about how to resolve "one bad die roll at a critical time, screws my character" issues. Moving all the way to "completely rebuild our own game system to resolve everything by using a fixed set of per-rest resources" is so far far far beyond that requirement, tbat I feel like we've lost the point here. And anything less than such significant modifications to the games we are playing now, (again IMO) creates more problems than the one we're trying to solve in the first place.

Remember as well that the idea of the cards started as 'you can eliminate the randomness and make the process of rolling a meaningful choice by making the player have to select when to use high rolls and when to use low'. It was not initially intended as an actual plan, just a way to get people to think about whether or not they really want to eliminate the randomness. That it immediately started to be disassembled to figure out how it could be exploited, and the discussion turned to how it is basically a different game that people would be playing to manipulate the decks certainly says something about how much randomness people want in their game, and how much "Delta" people really want or need.


The "Why Hexcrawls?" thread got me thinking about this subject, and I decided to write it down to formalize my thoughts and in case it's useful to anyone.
Delta in this case refers to amount of difference, as in - "How differently will things go in the game as a result of this choice?"

For me, that's the main factor in how meaningful / important something feels. Not everything in a game needs maximum delta! For example, a game with a linear plot has very little delta in that area, but that doesn't mean it won't be fun anyway. But it does mean that a scene like "discussion about which route to take, that's IC supposed to be intense and meaningful" isn't going to hit very well for me if I know that we're getting to the same destination in the same condition regardless.

That's where the thread started. Talking about how choices that have an impact make the game more meaningful. Changing rolling - which is not a choice at all, just luck of the dice - to cards where the player chooses each card knowing that it will impact future card availability greatly increases how differently things will go, and it is clear to the players that it will do so. They have to decide when they should use their nat 20 - for a difficult check, or to crit? Or their 1 - bite the bullet and accept a miss in combat, or fail at a skill check or a save? Can you arrange for advantage often enough that you can burn the bad cards that way, and is it worth it to change other tactics to get advantage to do so? All of these are choices and the player can tell how those choices affect the rest of the game because it is right in front of them.

[Mordar]

Remember as well that the idea of the cards started as 'you can eliminate the randomness and make the process of rolling a meaningful choice by making the player have to select when to use high rolls and when to use low'. It was not initially intended as an actual plan, just a way to get people to think about whether or not they really want to eliminate the randomness. That it immediately started to be disassembled to figure out how it could be exploited, and the discussion turned to how it is basically a different game that people would be playing to manipulate the decks certainly says something about how much randomness people want in their game, and how much "Delta" people really want or need.

From my perspective, at least, not so much "how it could be exploited" to instead something more like "what are the consequences of this design decision that will work contrary to its intent and/or significantly alter the experience in an unpleasant way". Particularly since I do not see the inclusion of uncertainty or chance changing the meaningfulness of player choice. [So clearly, I 100% do not want to eliminate chance in games like this...but I agree with minor ways to mitigate impact of chance in select circumstances].


That's where the thread started. Talking about how choices that have an impact make the game more meaningful. Changing rolling - which is not a choice at all, just luck of the dice - to cards where the player chooses each card knowing that it will impact future card availability greatly increases how differently things will go, and it is clear to the players that it will do so. They have to decide when they should use their nat 20 - for a difficult check, or to crit? Or their 1 - bite the bullet and accept a miss in combat, or fail at a skill check or a save? Can you arrange for advantage often enough that you can burn the bad cards that way, and is it worth it to change other tactics to get advantage to do so? All of these are choices and the player can tell how those choices affect the rest of the game because it is right in front of them.

The meaningful choice isn't "do I roll the die or don't I?", though. The meaningful choice is generally "do I attempt this action that may succeed or may fail?". The result of the die roll doesn't make the choice more or less meaningful. It just confirms the outcome. Swapping dice out and cards in does add a new gamist choice...but doesn't alter the really meaningful choices made in the game. In a reactive sense there isn't as much immediate choice...it isn't "do I choose to be in the dragon's breath weapon and try to save against the damage, or don't I?" But it is "I choose to come on this adventure so I accept that this is a potential pitfall of that choice" moment.

This is not pejorative: A fixed card-based resolution system is much more aligned (to me) with collaborative storytelling.

Inclusion of chance (via whatever method - dice rolling, card drawing (not selecting), rochambeau, whatever) is more of a game experience. Including rules that allow mitigation of chance provides opportunity for both player and character skill to have a greater influence on the outcome and supports meaningful choice.

- M

[Darth Credence]

From my perspective, at least, not so much "how it could be exploited" to instead something more like "what are the consequences of this design decision that will work contrary to its intent and/or significantly alter the experience in an unpleasant way". Particularly since I do not see the inclusion of uncertainty or chance changing the meaningfulness of player choice. [So clearly, I 100% do not want to eliminate chance in games like this...but I agree with minor ways to mitigate impact of chance in select circumstances].



The meaningful choice isn't "do I roll the die or don't I?", though. The meaningful choice is generally "do I attempt this action that may succeed or may fail?". The result of the die roll doesn't make the choice more or less meaningful. It just confirms the outcome. Swapping dice out and cards in does add a new gamist choice...but doesn't alter the really meaningful choices made in the game. In a reactive sense there isn't as much immediate choice...it isn't "do I choose to be in the dragon's breath weapon and try to save against the damage, or don't I?" But it is "I choose to come on this adventure so I accept that this is a potential pitfall of that choice" moment.

This is not pejorative: A fixed card-based resolution system is much more aligned (to me) with collaborative storytelling.

Inclusion of chance (via whatever method - dice rolling, card drawing (not selecting), rochambeau, whatever) is more of a game experience. Including rules that allow mitigation of chance provides opportunity for both player and character skill to have a greater influence on the outcome and supports meaningful choice.

- M

The meaningful choice with cards is, "What card do I use now, knowing that it will be a card I cannot use later?" This, to me, absolutely is a meaningful choice that fits that original topic, and the reason I introduced the idea in the first place. The question was "How differently will things go in the game as a result of this choice?", and by the third post that had been expanded to "informed delta", about whether the player could predict that there would be a change, could see it in retrospect, or just there were changes but you have no way of knowing that.

If someone wants a choice they can predict (NichG called that the most meaningful), cards in place of dice do something there. You have a choice - what card do I play now. You should have a good idea of some results of that choice - the outcome of the current action. There are some others that you can predict, that you may be wrong or right about - perhaps you know that this leaves you with only two low cards, so you are likely to fail in the future, or perhaps that was your first card spent and you think it won't be a big deal, because it was the 12, and why would you need that card later, or whatever. They know the choice made, know that not having a card they need later could be tied directly back to the choice here and now. Maybe they used their nat 20 to crit an orc so it dies in one shot, to take away any possibility of the orc responding, and so didn't have a high enough card to make a save or ability check later; maybe they used their nat 1 there, and the orc got another shot and did a few HP of damage, but someone else killed it with their next shot, and the character now passes that later save and has more net HP (but, their party member used a card, and that was part of a choice, too).

Now, I personally feel that narrative choices are what are more important here, but it was also established early that things like character creation was a source of delta, so I think that eliminating the randomness and making it a choice would also count. If anyone is purely interested in the choice that comes from a narrative, not choice in general, then the cards/dice talk is meaningless. That could be what you mean by "meaningful" above, just the narrative choices. But if so, then is the choice to use reckless attack, or the bonus damage/attack penalty of sharpshooter, also meaningless? If they are, OK. If they aren't, though, then neither are the cards, because they serve a similar function - choosing to take a penalty in one place in exchange for a bonus elsewhere.

[Mordar]

The meaningful choice with cards is, "What card do I use now, knowing that it will be a card I cannot use later?" This, to me, absolutely is a meaningful choice that fits that original topic, and the reason I introduced the idea in the first place. The question was "How differently will things go in the game as a result of this choice?", and by the third post that had been expanded to "informed delta", about whether the player could predict that there would be a change, could see it in retrospect, or just there were changes but you have no way of knowing that.

I agree that which card to play in this situation is a meaningful choice - I would choose to use "meaningful game choice" just to differentiate it from a "meaningful narrative choice". I believe those to be tertiary in the current (and past) RPGs that I prefer, and recognize that is my own baggage.


If someone wants a choice they can predict (NichG called that the most meaningful), cards in place of dice do something there. You have a choice - what card do I play now. You should have a good idea of some results of that choice - the outcome of the current action. There are some others that you can predict, that you may be wrong or right about - perhaps you know that this leaves you with only two low cards, so you are likely to fail in the future, or perhaps that was your first card spent and you think it won't be a big deal, because it was the 12, and why would you need that card later, or whatever. They know the choice made, know that not having a card they need later could be tied directly back to the choice here and now. Maybe they used their nat 20 to crit an orc so it dies in one shot, to take away any possibility of the orc responding, and so didn't have a high enough card to make a save or ability check later; maybe they used their nat 1 there, and the orc got another shot and did a few HP of damage, but someone else killed it with their next shot, and the character now passes that later save and has more net HP (but, their party member used a card, and that was part of a choice, too).

I don't think I disagree with anything here. I just don't like the system from an RPG standpoint, but as a fan of many card games and a reasonable number of board games, I find it compelling and fun in those cases.


Now, I personally feel that narrative choices are what are more important here, but it was also established early that things like character creation was a source of delta, so I think that eliminating the randomness and making it a choice would also count. If anyone is purely interested in the choice that comes from a narrative, not choice in general, then the cards/dice talk is meaningless. That could be what you mean by "meaningful" above, just the narrative choices. But if so, then is the choice to use reckless attack, or the bonus damage/attack penalty of sharpshooter, also meaningless? If they are, OK. If they aren't, though, then neither are the cards, because they serve a similar function - choosing to take a penalty in one place in exchange for a bonus elsewhere.

I think the value/impact of choice at character creation varies a lot depending on the specific game. With games like D&D on one side and, say, Vampire or Marvel Super Heroes (particularly FASERIP) on the other, you have games where character creation is just a starting point that might make some paths easier and some paths harder to follow...and on the other, even after years of regular play your character is really just a minor modification of how they started out.

I think that meaningfulness is probably a spectrum, for me. Typically I'd view the spectrum (for games like D&D) as: In-game narrative choices >> character development choices (leveling) >> character generation choices > in-game system choices.

In-game system choices would be which card to play, do I use a limited or consumable resource on this action, do I make a gamist adjustment to gain a bonus on this roll kinds of things.

I think it is clear that all of these choices have an impact on the success or failure of an in-game narrative choice, and thus gain meaningful-by-association credit...but to mean it isn't nearly the same value as the in-game narrative choice ("do I sneak past the dragon, engage in conversation, or try to split it in half?").

- M

[icefractal]

I was thinking about this, and for me it comes down to micro-delta vs macro-delta.

Consider a game with a linear story where everyone has to play literally the same build. I'd call that low-delta.

But then let's say that one build is a high-level Warblade. So within combat there's quite a bit of meaningful decisions round to round. I think I would still consider that game fairly low delta, or at least not providing what I look for from a high-delta game.

Not that micro-delta is bad! It's just not enough by itself, IMO

[kyoryu]

Not that micro-delta is bad! It's just not enough by itself, IMO

It's not for me either, but it clearly is for some people.

The key here I think is really knowing where players want/expect/need to have delta, as not all players have the same expectation. I have little interest in build choices and delta from them, but high interest in "narrative choice delta" (which sounds kinda like you). Others really don't care about narrative choice delta, but really do care about the micro-stuff.

[gbaji]

The meaningful choice with cards is, "What card do I use now, knowing that it will be a card I cannot use later?" This, to me, absolutely is a meaningful choice that fits that original topic, and the reason I introduced the idea in the first place. The question was "How differently will things go in the game as a result of this choice?", and by the third post that had been expanded to "informed delta", about whether the player could predict that there would be a change, could see it in retrospect, or just there were changes but you have no way of knowing that.

Right. But the meaning to playing the card is playing the card. The problem is that playing a card isn't correlated to anything in the "game world" itself. In most games, this does not matter. If I'm playing a game of hearts, I'm not playing an imaginary hero somewhere, and playing these cards in specific order somehow correlates to some actions they are taking in this imginary world. I'm playing the cards, and the cards onliy have meaning in relation to the other cards in play at the same time.

But in a RPG we *are* adding the element of an "imaginary world" into things. The actions in game are relevant. And we already have a concept of "expending resources" as well. "do I use my potion of strength to lift this heavy grate, or save it for battle later?" is a real choice. It correlates to specific decisions and impacts in the game world we are playing within. Those are the "meaningful choices" that correspond to "how do I play my cards" in a card game. Most RPGs have these concepts already, and they represent specific game objects within the game itself. What spells do you use, and when. What feats do you use, and when. What abilities do you use, and when. What potions, X-use items, etc? Same deal.

The game already has this concept included within it (or at least most RPGs do). Why add another? And one that has no correlation to "game objects" in the game we are playing. This is why I keep looping back to the fact that by doing something like this, you are now playing a card game, and not a RPG. The outcome is not so much about the stats and abilities on the sheet in front of you, and choices you make based on those things, but rather being able to play your hand well, by predicting the number and type and difficulty of the challenges the GM will place in front of you, and deciding well how to use your cards to manage those things.

That's certainly a game we could play. Heck, it may even be a fun game. But it's not what most would call a RPG. That's closer to playing Pandemic IMO, than D&D.


If someone wants a choice they can predict (NichG called that the most meaningful), cards in place of dice do something there. You have a choice - what card do I play now.

And that's the problem. In a RPG, the choices should be "what action does my character do, and what in-game items, spells, abilities does he use to try to perform that action?". Making it "what card do I play?" means we are playing a different game.

[ciopo]

Food for thoughts: I was in a campaign and the mood of the day at the time I planned the character for that campaign was that I wanted to be as sure as possible that "traps" were a nonissue to my character, my backstory was some flimsy "usual adventurers are dummies that triggers traps the barbarian way, I must save them!" This having been pathfinder 1st edition, my build-fu is fairly high, and I basically guaranteed no level appropriate trap could evade my notice, between fairly high circumstancial bonuses to perception to notice hidden things, a trait that allowed taking 10 on perception at all times, and that rogue tlaent that allowed for passive trap perception.

GM didn't like I was doing a no sell on traps, and so raised the DC, an OOC talk ensued and I scaled back on no-selling traps.

Now, I don't want to derail the thread about the legitimacy of making player choices irrelevant ( be they at build time such as mine, or at table time), but if I was in a less charitable mood and in a less chill/mature group, my reaction to that would be to start to either roll the d20 without the modifiers, because with that kind of adjustment modifers don't matter, and so I better invest those resources elsewhere, or tell the total but not what I rolled, blessed be my brain that's fast at math.

A somewhat middle ground would probably be for me to ask "what's the DC" before any perception for traps roll, or if we go straight to "roll a dexterity save, you triggered a trap" to friendly reminder "i have a passive for finding traps without actively searching for them, do I get a perception roll first to prevent the triggering?"

[gbaji]

GM didn't like I was doing a no sell on traps, and so raised the DC, an OOC talk ensued and I scaled back on no-selling traps.

This is the first problem. GMs should never do this. If a player creates a build that is specifically about preventing something from being a huge problem, the GM needs to allow that. Your experience highlights an issue which I've touched on in the past. The GM can always "rig the game". It's something that GMs need to be highly aware of, since there will be a tendency when writing/running a scenario to think "this is what I want to have happen", and then looking at the characters being played, and "adjusting" things to make that outcome happen.

As a GM, it's important to balance what you want to accomplish with the scenario and what the PCs bring to the table. If anything, and the GM is going to fudge things at all, they should be fudged in favor of ensuring that if a PC spent resources/build/whatever on something, that you make that "something" be relevant during play. A good chunk of this is session zero stuff. If you know your entire campaign has no undead, maybe warn off the player who is building an "undead killer" character. If you allow that build, then you maybe should make sure to put some undead in there, right?

As a general rule, as a GM, if you are going to adjust things in response to character builds/personality/whatever, you should always adjust things in favor of making the game more fun for the players. You should not treat it as a competition that you need to "win".

As a side point, I'm not sure why any GM would find traps to be so important to their game, as to make such an adjustment in the first place. I find traps to be a pain in the butt in the first place. I rarely put them into my games. When I do, you can bet there's a very very good rationale for why it exists, how it exists, how/why it's still functional where it is at the time it is (traps are a heck of a lot trickier than most think). And yeah, the problem of "how do I put something in that will be tricky to manage, but not just arbitrarily kill characters" is always at the forefront of my mind.

Someone coming up to me with a "I can spot traps easily" build, would result in a sigh of relief from me. Great! Now I don't have to worry about accidentally killing someone's character. Thanks player! If anything, I'd be concerned that the PC has overly built in this area and wont make much use of his skills (though, the same skills for spotting traps may be useful for spotting/detecting other things so...). The last thing I'd want to do is mightily work to thwart that build and make sure my traps hit the PCs anyway. That's just... strange.

[kyoryu]

This is the first problem. GMs should never do this. If a player creates a build that is specifically about preventing something from being a huge problem, the GM needs to allow that. Your experience highlights an issue which I've touched on in the past. The GM can always "rig the game". It's something that GMs need to be highly aware of, since there will be a tendency when writing/running a scenario to think "this is what I want to have happen", and then looking at the characters being played, and "adjusting" things to make that outcome happen.

This.

Honestly, I consider it a flaw in the game design. If you want to be able to let a character bypass an aspect of game design, I'd rather have it be a pretty explicit ability that says "this doesn't work". If you do it by adding a bunch of unrelated things, it kinda feels bad from my perspective.

At any rate, the GM screwed up by not saying "okay, look, this character is completely out of bounds in this area, let's talk about this." Which was the eventual conversation, but it really should have been the GM having that conversation up front rather than adjusting things up.

I think that "reasonable bounds" is an important conversation in any games that have wide levels of optimization potential. When I ran or played GURPS, GM approval of the character was always a mandatory step.

[gbaji]

This.

Honestly, I consider it a flaw in the game design. If you want to be able to let a character bypass an aspect of game design, I'd rather have it be a pretty explicit ability that says "this doesn't work". If you do it by adding a bunch of unrelated things, it kinda feels bad from my perspective.

At any rate, the GM screwed up by not saying "okay, look, this character is completely out of bounds in this area, let's talk about this." Which was the eventual conversation, but it really should have been the GM having that conversation up front rather than adjusting things up.

I think that "reasonable bounds" is an important conversation in any games that have wide levels of optimization potential. When I ran or played GURPS, GM approval of the character was always a mandatory step.

Right. We've all had that situation where a player has min/maxed their way into a ridiculous build that will effectively break the game/setting/adventure/whatever. A really good game system shouldn't allow this, but let's face it, there are plenty out there that do, and it's pretty much up to GM and player agreements not to exploit things to that point. But... that's a session zero conversation.

It's a really passive/agressive thing for a GM to allow the build, but then work behind the scenes to artificiallly "adjust" things so as to nullify said build's strengths. But in fairness to GMs, I've found that there is a school of thought that the players should be able to build and run "anything they want", so many GMs are hesitant to just directly say "no. that character wont work in this game/adventure". And sometimes, it's about the GM wanting to avoid a confrontation, or not wanting to appear to be unreasonable. So I do get the process that may result in something like this. But it's a trap that GMs need to train themselves to avoid. Players will be far more accepting of up front restrictions on what they can build than they will be disovering via playing that the GM is "soft rigging" the adventure to block their character's actions. The former may result in some disappointment (but IME, players usually know when they're pushing things and are basically waiting for the GM to set those boundaries, and respect them when they do), but the latter will result in the player being actively upset and unhappy with the game. And said unhappiness will tend to fester and grow over time as the game is being played out. Usually with poor results.

When we were resetting our current campain game/setting, we sat down and discussed what we wanted to do, and set some ground rules for GMing (we swap out GMs in our game). One of the major things we discussed and agreed on was that the GM running would always be allowed to just say "that character doesn't fit this adventure". And not just on builds (that rarely comes up in this game), but usually about power level. We had all had bad experiences in the past with GMs who didn't do this, and the problems that it caused (either way, it's a problem). So it just made sense. And we've never had any issues with it.

As to "adjusting" things in an adventure as it's going, there's nothing innately wrong with that. All GMs do it to some degree. Heck. I use the first handful of encounters specifcally to "fine tune" things. It's often very hard to tell just by looking at character sheets how the entire group will perform as a party in various situations, so I've found this to be important. Learning their strengths (and most importantly potential holes and vulnerabilities) is key to having good encounter balance in the adventure. However, any tuning or adjusting should always be made with an eye towards making the game more fun, and not in a competitive "GM vs the players" way.

[kyoryu]

But in fairness to GMs, I've found that there is a school of thought that the players should be able to build and run "anything they want", so many GMs are hesitant to just directly say "no. that character wont work in this game/adventure". And sometimes, it's about the GM wanting to avoid a confrontation, or not wanting to appear to be unreasonable. So I do get the process that may result in something like this. But it's a trap that GMs need to train themselves to avoid. Players will be far more accepting of up front restrictions on what they can build than they will be disovering via playing that the GM is "soft rigging" the adventure to block their character's actions. The former may result in some disappointment (but IME, players usually know when they're pushing things and are basically waiting for the GM to set those boundaries, and respect them when they do), but the latter will result in the player being actively upset and unhappy with the game. And said unhappiness will tend to fester and grow over time as the game is being played out. Usually with poor results.

Yeah, exactly. Ultimately, they're both the same - "no, you can't play that". But doing it "behind the scenes" is just passive aggressive and dishonest. Better to just have the conversation!

[Mordar]

Right. We've all had that situation where a player has min/maxed their way into a ridiculous build that will effectively break the game/setting/adventure/whatever. A really good game system shouldn't allow this, but let's face it, there are plenty out there that do, and it's pretty much up to GM and player agreements not to exploit things to that point. But... that's a session zero conversation.

But this is just traps...was a total rookie move, IMO, to nerf it. And if you *really* need traps for some reason I can't imagine (beyond wanting to play Tomb of Horrors)...well, Grimtooth's can be found in PDF, and there are traps-within-traps there.

- M

[Devils_Advocate]

As to "adjusting" things in an adventure as it's going, there's nothing innately wrong with that. All GMs do it to some degree. Heck. I use the first handful of encounters specifcally to "fine tune" things. It's often very hard to tell just by looking at character sheets how the entire group will perform as a party in various situations, so I've found this to be important. Learning their strengths (and most importantly potential holes and vulnerabilities) is key to having good encounter balance in the adventure.
Eh, how is that different from what ciopo's DM did to prevent him from trivializing traps? You may feel that traps aren't legitimate encounters and thus are not subject to encounter balance, but that strikes me as more of a personal bias than anything else.

Is it that "raising the DC", given that phrasing, presumably wasn't accompanied by a change in description? I can certainly agree that there's a subtle but important difference between giving an enemy raiding party better armor and giving them a +5 ScrewYouMunchkins bonus to AC.


Potential results can significantly differ from each other in ways that don't make one clearly and straightforwardly "better" or "worse" than another, and that's often more interesting than degrees of clear-cut "success" or "failure".

Can you provide a couple examples for context?
Which is the superior option, a magic item that allows you to talk to animals, or a magic item that allows you to breathe underwater? Which is the better result from rolling on a random treasure table? If given the option to pick between the two, which is the smart, laudable choice, and which potential decision is the dumb, contemptible one? Obviously these questions have clear and objective answers.

Suppose that the pertinent supervillain has at last assembled the Tschotskes of Doom and is days away from completing the ritual that will plunge the land into darkness. On their way to stop him, our ragtag band of protagonists encounter the BBEG's army besieging a friendly kingdom. The PCs have critical information about the army's weaknesses, without which the kingdom will likely fall, but delivering this intelligence would cause them significant delay. On the other hand, they could then rally the kingdom's forces to attack the BBEG. And while it could be very helpful to head straight to the Ominous Obsidian Tower while the bad guy's forces are tied up here, there may also be a significant military presence at the Tower, which could make getting inside nearly impossible.

There's uncertainty about long-term results, but there's also questions of what characters' priorities are. For example, how much do they care about long-term results? (And for those who are all about maximizing various expected values, how confident are they in their math? At the point where all of the quantities you plug into your equations were pulled out of your ass based on what "seems most likely", maybe you should at least be considering more of a rule consequentialist approach?) Are they driven by their personal connections to others, even if that means forsaking, or possibly even personally harming, larger numbers of beings who are equally worthy of consideration and protection?

It's kind of a shame that Ron Edwards went with "narrativism" here, because a clearer name might have drawn more attention, and I think that this sort of thing is intriguing stuff.


Do you mean situations were, for instance, a "villain" plot isn't foiled...but the consequences of that plot end up spawning branching stories that actually lead to a more immersive narrative? A filler adventure at 3rd level that ends up defining the entirety of the campaign, and a throw-away adversary becomes the nemesis? Or something more like a butterfly flaps its wings...?
No, I'm not talking about the likelihood of any and every event to have both positive and negative consequences over the long term. That doesn't rule out an informed guess that, all things considered, it still seems like e.g. starving to death is probably bad, and therefore you shouldn't stop eating. I'm talking much more about the subjects of uninformed guesses. Stuff that doesn't even seem clear-cut, where the answer to "Which is better and which is worse?" is "Hell, I don't know, man". Things that are at least very subject to interpretation, where it's entirely possible for people to disagree with each other for reasons other than stupidity and irrationality. Not matters like the relative merits of strawberry and chocolate ice cream, which is of course an issue of pure fact.

[KorvinStarmast]

It's kind of a shame that Ron Edwards went with "narrativism" here, because a clearer name might have drawn more attention, and I think that this sort of thing is intriguing stuff. What term would you suggest?


I'm talking much more about the subjects of uninformed guesses. Stuff that doesn't even seem clear-cut, where the answer to "Which is better and which is worse?" is "Hell, I don't know, man". Things that are at least very subject to interpretation, where it's entirely possible for people to disagree with each other for reasons other than stupidity and irrationality. Not matters like the relative merits of strawberry and chocolate ice cream, which is of course an issue of pure fact.
Pistachio trumps both. :smallbiggrin:

[gbaji]

The full quote:


As to "adjusting" things in an adventure as it's going, there's nothing innately wrong with that. All GMs do it to some degree. Heck. I use the first handful of encounters specifcally to "fine tune" things. It's often very hard to tell just by looking at character sheets how the entire group will perform as a party in various situations, so I've found this to be important. Learning their strengths (and most importantly potential holes and vulnerabilities) is key to having good encounter balance in the adventure. However, any tuning or adjusting should always be made with an eye towards making the game more fun, and not in a competitive "GM vs the players" way.

Your response:



As to "adjusting" things in an adventure as it's going, there's nothing innately wrong with that. All GMs do it to some degree. Heck. I use the first handful of encounters specifcally to "fine tune" things. It's often very hard to tell just by looking at character sheets how the entire group will perform as a party in various situations, so I've found this to be important. Learning their strengths (and most importantly potential holes and vulnerabilities) is key to having good encounter balance in the adventure.

Eh, how is that different from what ciopo's DM did to prevent him from trivializing traps? You may feel that traps aren't legitimate encounters and thus are not subject to encounter balance, but that strikes me as more of a personal bias than anything else.

Why did you trim out the one sentence in the paragraph you quoted which addressed the very question you then raised?

What ciopo's DM was doing falls squarely in the "competitive GM vs players" situation I wrote about (and not "making the game more fun"). That's how it's different.


Is it that "raising the DC", given that phrasing, presumably wasn't accompanied by a change in description? I can certainly agree that there's a subtle but important difference between giving an enemy raiding party better armor and giving them a +5 ScrewYouMunchkins bonus to AC.

That's part of it. But the biggest point is "why" it's being done. The GM was specifically increasing the difficulty of the traps in response to a PC having high trap detecting/disarming skills. This may seem like normal balancing of an adventure, but it has the effect of negating the character build.

There are three broad ways to make things more challenging. You can increase the number of threats, or the danger of threats, or the difficutly of threats. What's interesting is that the first two often result in positive perception by the players, while the third is often negative. If I'm really good at something (melee combat, ranged combat, spells, traps, social stuff, whatever), then the more things in the adventure that require that skill, the more I feel my character is contributing. So putting in more mooks to fight, or more things that require spells, or more traps, or more intrigue, etc is a good thing, despite that this can technically make the adventire more challenging. Same deal if we up the danger. If failure to defeat the opponents, or use the right spell, or disarm that trap, or deal with the social issue, has higher risks then that again makes the use of and value for using those things greater, which makes the players feel good about what they did (they stopped something "bigger" and "badder", right?)

But... And this is significant. If I just make the mooks tougher, or the DC/resistance to spells higher, or the traps DC higher, or the intrigue stuff harder (ie: just increasing the mechanical die roll result required to succeed), then this is negative. You aren't increasing the value of the skills or abilities of the characters, nor the rewards for using those things, but watering down the effect of them having them in the first place. If the rewards/consequences for success/failure are exactly the same, but the number I have to roll on the die to succeed is harder, then that has no effect other than to make the character less effective. That's not really "balancing" the adventure. I mean, you can approach balance that way, but IMO that's not a great way to do it, precisely because it will make the players feel like their characters are just less effecitve at eveything they do. And doing his for just one aspect of the adventure, to counter one specific characters abilities, is even worse.

Note, that increasing the difficulty while not increasing anything else is what makes this a problem. Obviously, if those increases come along with other aspects of the adventure (bigger stakes, tougher monsters, bigger rewards, etc), then that's fine. But if you're doing it just because "the PCs skills are too high, so I'll make the rolls they need to make harder" then that's "doing it wrong" IMO. In the OP case, I don't think the DM upped the rewards/stakes/whatever for overcoming these traps. He just made the die rolls needed to defeat them harder to make. So yeah, that falls squarely in "poor way to balance things".

[GloatingSwine]

That's part of it. But the biggest point is "why" it's being done. The GM was specifically increasing the difficulty of the traps in response to a PC having high trap detecting/disarming skills. This may seem like normal balancing of an adventure, but it has the effect of negating the character build.


It doesn't.

It's actually the only response to the build that preserves it.

There are three paths here.

1. Use normally difficult traps which have no effect because of this character.

2. Increase the difficulty of traps to challenge a party which contains this character.

3. Give up on traps.


The terrible secret is that 1 and 3 are the same, and they are both death for an entire aspect of the game (traps). If the player who has built their character to never fall into a trap never falls into a trap their build "works" but traps have become gameplay neutral as long as they are present. There is no difference between them being there and not being there other than that one player is occasionally told "oh you spotted a trap have a sweetie I guess?".

Nobody is overcoming anything at that point.

[KorvinStarmast]

1. Use normally difficult traps which have no effect because of this character.

2. Increase the difficulty of traps to challenge a party which contains this character.

3. Give up on traps.

The terrible secret is that 1 and 3 are the same, and they are both death for an entire aspect of the game (traps). If the player who has built their character to never fall into a trap never falls into a trap their build "works" but traps have become gameplay neutral as long as they are present. There is no difference between them being there and not being there other than that one player is occasionally told "oh you spotted a trap have a sweetie I guess?".

Nobody is overcoming anything at that point.
Unless the time it takes to deal with the trap is taken into account. Choosing not to keep track of time, or removing time as a constraint, disrupts a variety of stuff; not just traps. That's the terrible secret: time is being overlooked or ignored.

[kyoryu]

I mean, really, in this case I think the answer is "don't force the players down a certain path". With this PC in tow, it might make more sense for them to take the trap-laden path more often than the others, or even try ones with more difficult traps that otherwise they might not want to.

"Okay, you need to get to the vault. There's four paths - the first one is going to have a lot of guards. The second one is going to involve a lot of sneaking around to avoid guards. The third is a secret passage, but you know it's going to have a good number of traps, but probably fewer guards, and the last one is going to have some horrible traps and maybe some automatons, but should be devoid of life."

Now they've got some real options, and the trap skills have opened up some possibilities that may not have been viable previously.

You can also take a page from older versions, and hide extra goodies or shortcuts behind nasty traps.

[gbaji]

It doesn't.

It's actually the only response to the build that preserves it.

I disagree (shocking! I know... :smallsmile: )


There are three paths here.

1. Use normally difficult traps which have no effect because of this character.

Which allows the PC to do exactly what the player spent the character skill points or whatever to do. Avoid the harm from traps. This preserves the character build perfectly. It just doesn't allow the GM to make "traps are dangerous" happen in the adventure.


2. Increase the difficulty of traps to challenge a party which contains this character.

This destroys the character build. Assuming there was some cost involved in making the character super good at dealing with traps, which means that this character is less capable at other things, then the character has lost those other potential abilities, but gained nothing in return. The party will have exactly the same difficulty dealing with traps if the character had spent a minimal amount on trap based skills than the maximal amount he did.

This is the absolute worst thing to do here.


3. Give up on traps.

This is also bad. So now the player has spent all of these points on their character, buit the GM removes the thing the character is desgined to deal with from the game? This falls right into the "PC with massive anti-undead abilities in a campaign with no undead" problem.



The terrible secret is that 1 and 3 are the same, and they are both death for an entire aspect of the game (traps).

They are the same only from the "GM versus the party" perspective. If the only relevance is "how much do I (the GM) hurt the PCs with my traps" you are correct. But if the point is "I'm putting things in the adventure for the PCs to overcome", then there's a huge difference between 1 and 3. With 1, the player who focused their character on preventing traps from harming the party gets to succeed at exactly that which they designed the character to do. With 3, they get to experience the disappointment of having a build focused on something that doesn't exist and thus feel that they wasted the build/character/whatever points.

2 and 3 are bad choices.


If the player who has built their character to never fall into a trap never falls into a trap their build "works" but traps have become gameplay neutral as long as they are present. There is no difference between them being there and not being there other than that one player is occasionally told "oh you spotted a trap have a sweetie I guess?".

As stated above, only if the traps exist only as a sidenote thing or are an otherwise unavoidable element to the game. But, if there are choices in the game, and traps become part of the decision making process, beiing able to trivially deal with them becomes an option creating choice.

Consider a character with excellent stealth and climbing abilities. The party is faced with a tall wall, with a guard entrance in it that they must get through. The fact that that character has the ability to quietly scale the wall, sneak down the other side, and surprise the guards from behind or open the gate/door/whatever, or otherswise provide a means to overcome this obstacle other than "run up to the guards, defeat them and batter down the door". Having the wall exist and be climbable, and a means to mange this, provides value for the character who is good at climbing and stealthing. If the GMs response to that character providing a means other than "fight our way through the front door" is to remove the wall or otherwise make the wall harder to climb, I'm pretty sure we'd all consider that GM a complete jerk for doing that.

Some character builds will trivialize some content. There's nothing wrong with that. As long as the GM hasn't essentially built the entire adventure to be a one-trick-pony, this should not be an issue at all.. The stealthy wall climber will shine when they need to cllimb walls and get behind folks. The trap disarmer will shine when there are traps to disarm. The spell caster will shine when there's like spell to cast. And the melee folks will shine when it's time to rumble or something. The point is that an adventure should not fall apart because one player built one character with a skill specialization.

And yeah. As I said much earlier in the thread, if someone builds a character that is an actual dealbreaker for the adventure, then that's a session zero discussion to have. You don't fix that by negating the build.


Nobody is overcoming anything at that point.

It's exactly the opposite. They're overcoming everything at that point. Exactly as the character build was designed to do.

[Mordar]

It doesn't.

It's actually the only response to the build that preserves it.

There are three paths here.

1. Use normally difficult traps which have no effect because of this character.

2. Increase the difficulty of traps to challenge a party which contains this character.

3. Give up on traps.


The terrible secret is that 1 and 3 are the same, and they are both death for an entire aspect of the game (traps). If the player who has built their character to never fall into a trap never falls into a trap their build "works" but traps have become gameplay neutral as long as they are present. There is no difference between them being there and not being there other than that one player is occasionally told "oh you spotted a trap have a sweetie I guess?".

Nobody is overcoming anything at that point.

1 is the only legitimate response, IMO. This tiny aspect of the game isn't killed by a trap-breaking character. The player made a design choice - frankly one that doesn't impact a whole lot in the average game - and the GM, in response, punished the rest of the party while also invalidating the player design choice. You leave the standard trap difficulties right where they are because it is right, it still poses a risk for the other players in a reasonable array of situations, you get to give easy wins to the player while also taking advantage of the fact they are going to be less effective in other situations, and then you *still* get to have cool high-difficulty traps in situations where it makes narrative sense...like the Tomb of the Pharaoh, the Thief King's Lair, and Archimedes' Garden.

Unless you intentionally designed a trap-heavy campaign, and discussed this with the player before they made their design choices. That's a dart of a different toxin.

- M

[Vahnavoi]

It doesn't.

It's actually the only response to the build that preserves it.

There are three paths here.

1. Use normally difficult traps which have no effect because of this character.

2. Increase the difficulty of traps to challenge a party which contains this character.

3. Give up on traps.


The terrible secret is that 1 and 3 are the same, and they are both death for an entire aspect of the game (traps). If the player who has built their character to never fall into a trap never falls into a trap their build "works" but traps have become gameplay neutral as long as they are present. There is no difference between them being there and not being there other than that one player is occasionally told "oh you spotted a trap have a sweetie I guess?".

Nobody is overcoming anything at that point.

I contest that.

The first way I contest it was already touched upon by kyoryu: we can imagine branching paths from the very beginning. In the simplest version, there is one path with normal traps and a second with deadly traps. Without any special trap-bypassing skill, a player will face normal challenge going down the first path and a difficult challenge going down the second path. With special trap-bypassing skills, a player will face an easy challenge going down the first path and an alternative normal challenge going down the second. Add different pay-offs to different paths, and presto, a player has four distinct choices.

The second was already touched upon by KorvinStarmast: resource costs. There ought to be an opportunity cost to specializing and a time cost to using special abilities. A specialist breezing through lots of easy traps is both getting a tangible pay-off for the cost and paying additional time costs for the activity. A specialist finding no traps has nothing to do and will feel like they would've been better off specializing in anything else.

[ciopo]

there is an interesting conseguence of seeing behind the curtain once you know there is a kind of direct relation between skill ranks and DC: You make suboptimal choice son purpose.

In that same campaign, we have a mcguffin that require a fairly high Use Magic Device check to activate, for a long time the bard of the group was the "designated carrier" of said artifact, due to having the highest UMD

We find a reusable book that gives a stackable +6 circumstance bonus to UMD, but only for the purpose of interacting with the artifact. Bard player didn't want to read it.

And while it would make absolutely the most sense for whoever most adept to use the artifact ot milk the book for all it's worth, here the OOC consideration "I better not read that book, the conseguence will be the DC will increase" was plain for us player to see, even if we didn't state it outright.

Now I guess a possible twist is that the GM also considered that? and the book was a gimmick to make the artifact usable by the rest of the party too? because it is a "party resource", after all, and playing around with the cool gimmicky artifact would be fun for the other players, too.


Still bizarro, and in that campaign I started spreading my skill ranks around to be the dabbliest of the dabblers, rather than keeping max ranks on only some of them.


It's as Gbaji says that increased DC feels punitive and invalidating of my choices at the time



A thing I would contest is that it was a "competitive GM vs players", he's an eminently reasonable person, just old school within the scope of "characters must be challenged / no chance of failure doesn't make for interesting gameplay" line of thought

[Satinavian]

The central problem is that some people believe that "fun, exciting gameplay" must mean that in the end it comes down to dice rolls that could go either way to create tension.

This belief is wrong but widespread. It leads to GMs trying to carefully craft combats to be just the right difficulty, to adjust DCs to make every important task a gamble, to sabotage any solutions that are guaranteed to work and give unexpected help in all hopeless situations.

But no, many players don't find that fun. The tension of a dice roll only excites the gambler type of player. Those people do exist but they are very much not a majority. There are at least as many players deriving satisfaction from solving a situation with their choices and ideas and feeling smart about it. But that can only work if those choices and ideas actually make a difference instead of just providing fluff for the inevitable dice roll.

[gbaji]

A thing I would contest is that it was a "competitive GM vs players", he's an eminently reasonable person, just old school within the scope of "characters must be challenged / no chance of failure doesn't make for interesting gameplay" line of thought

While there are certainly other (and much worse!) ways a GM can be competitive towards the players, this is still one of them. And yeah. I get that many GMs may fall into this behavior by thinking "I want to make sure my players feel they are being challenged", but it really can have a negative effect.

One of the most important pieces of advice I give to new(er) GMs is this: "let the players win". And by that, I don't mean "give them an unearned win", but that if they come up with the clever idea, let it work. If they have just the right skill at a high level, let that skill work. And if they happen to have just the right spell or magic item that trivializes some portion/challenge in your adventure, let it happen.

The absolute worse thing you can do as a GM is realize that one of your PCS has some means to easily deal with some element of your adventure which you intended to be difficult, and you start scrambling to "adjust things" to "make it challenging". I have, many times, seen the look that comes over a GMs face when they have that "huh, this is going to make this too easy" realization, and then you wait to see what the GM does next. And trust me. You think you have a poker face. You think your players don't realize that you added extra mooks, or changed the lock codes, or made it so that the thing they easily overcame wasn't actually the important thing at all, and you're just such a great GM that they'll never realize it, and you're just smoothly making things "work they way they should".... Nope. You are not fooling anyone. The entire table sees this happening and is almost certainly not happy with you for doing this.

Just... don't. Give the players the win and move on. You're the GM. You can always create a new dungeon (or more levels to the dungeon!), or new BBEG, or new quest to solve, or whatever. Don't dwell on a single expected vision of difficulty if/when things aren't working out perfectly. Just move on.


But no, many players don't find that fun. The tension of a dice roll only excites the gambler type of player. Those people do exist but they are very much not a majority. There are at least as many players deriving satisfaction from solving a situation with their choices and ideas and feeling smart about it. But that can only work if those choices and ideas actually make a difference instead of just providing fluff for the inevitable dice roll.

Correct. And man, I've noticed this. There certainly is a segment of players who fit that "gambler" trope. They want to roll the dice, they want the risk. That's what's exciting to them. But for everyone else (or at least, for me personally)? If I have done things in game (or with a character build) specifically to increase/improve (or even "guarantee") my odds of doing something, that better darn well have a noticable effect on the result. There's (almost) nothing more demoralizing to RPG players than the realization that the choices they make ahead of time have little or no actual effect on the odds of success later. If you actually want your players to plan ahead, you have to make sure that they get an advantage for doing so. If the die rolls suspiciously turn out to be about the same odds every time, regardless of how prepped or not we are, that's going to make the players question why they bother.

And when the players stop bothering to think ahead and plan, is when a game starts to die IMO. All that's left is following the GMs narrated script, rolling dice, and collecting treasure and exp. That's not going to hold much interest for most players.

[kyoryu]

One of the most important pieces of advice I give to new(er) GMs is this: "let the players win". And by that, I don't mean "give them an unearned win", but that if they come up with the clever idea, let it work. If they have just the right skill at a high level, let that skill work. And if they happen to have just the right spell or magic item that trivializes some portion/challenge in your adventure, let it happen.

I mostly agree. I think that any plan the players come up with should be treated as plausible unless there's a strong reason why it can't be based on the world or what you know of the situation.

But, yeah, if they come up with something that trivializes something, give them that win. Don't fight it.


The absolute worse thing you can do as a GM is realize that one of your PCS has some means to easily deal with some element of your adventure which you intended to be difficult, and you start scrambling to "adjust things" to "make it challenging". I have, many times, seen the look that comes over a GMs face when they have that "huh, this is going to make this too easy" realization, and then you wait to see what the GM does next.

For sure. And lucky roll takes out the big bad? Cool, go with it. Let your players think they just got that lucky and if not they were gonna get wiped. Take that info and roll forward with it.

I'm a big fan of playing the game straight. What the dice say, goes. While that can occasionally lead to poor results, the overall result of the players being able to trust the game outweighs that a thousand fold. It's a long term benefit in all cases.


And trust me. You think you have a poker face. You think your players don't realize that you added extra mooks, or changed the lock codes, or made it so that the thing they easily overcame wasn't actually the important thing at all, and you're just such a great GM that they'll never realize it, and you're just smoothly making things "work they way they should".... Nope. You are not fooling anyone. The entire table sees this happening and is almost certainly not happy with you for doing this.

Also one of the arguments against railroads and fudging. Players aren't stupid, and they figure it out faster than you think. They just usually don't bother saying anything. It's kind of the kayfaybe of RPGs, except you're keeping up the act to each other.


And when the players stop bothering to think ahead and plan, is when a game starts to die IMO. All that's left is following the GMs narrated script, rolling dice, and collecting treasure and exp. That's not going to hold much interest for most players.

And, hey, some people and GMs are into that, but just like be honest about that being the type of game you run.

[gbaji]

I mostly agree. I think that any plan the players come up with should be treated as plausible unless there's a strong reason why it can't be based on the world or what you know of the situation.

Yeah. I suppose a caveat to this is about how cruncy/soft the game you're playing is. If you're running a very firm "the rules say that to do this, you must use that methodology" kind of thing, then sometimes the really out of the box ideas maybe need to be rejected if they're outside the "normal resolution rules" area. The risk is that otherwise your game, which you maybe intended to be a relatively serious "must overcome dangerous/difficult obstacles" thing turns into something closer to Toon (which is fun as well, but maybe not what you wanted to run).

We had a player that was a serious out of the box thinker. He was constantly coming up with really strange ways of trying to do things. It was not uncommon for the GM to laugh, then recover from laughing, and say something like "Ok. That's hillarious. It shouldn't work, but I'm going to alllow it. But don't take that as a house rule change or something I'm going to allow to work this way in the future". And then we move on.

The point is that if it's clever and fun, and doesn't hurt the game? Allow it. If it will hurt the game (creates a precedent that will be used in the future and unbalance things) maybe tamp that down a bit. And yeah, how significant the thing being done can kinda matter here as well. If you've set up the super evil main big bad guy as a super huge threat, in a "this is deadly serious" way, it might be too jarring to have some really silly thing happen that defeats him/it/whatever.

So yeah. Some caveats with regards to retaining the feel/theme of the game/setting itself I suppose. You also don't want your players to think that the stats and abilities on their sheets matter less than "out of the box ideas" (unless you're literally playing that kind of game).


Also one of the arguments against railroads and fudging. Players aren't stupid, and they figure it out faster than you think. They just usually don't bother saying anything. It's kind of the kayfaybe of RPGs, except you're keeping up the act to each other.

Yup. I've played at a couple tables that ran like this. Everyone knew that the game worked this way, and were all more or less playing the GM more than the scenario. They would understand that the GM expected a certain level of challenge/difficulty before giving them the win, so they'd make sure to make things seem like they were struggling so that it would satisfy that requirement (even in situations where things should have been easy).

It's doable, but a bit strange. When you realize that all of the players are intentionally holding back using abilities/items/spells that would much more easily deal with the encounter because everyone at the table had almost a mental clock of "this is how much time/effort the GM expects this encounter to take". Or that players are intentionally using sub opitmal tactics, intentionally missing die rolls, flubbing spells, etc. The players will tend to do this because they realize that downplaying their own abilities would allow for what the GM wanted, while still ensuring that they could "safely win". If they didn't do this, then the GM would keep upping the difficulty until they were actually at the "we'll lose if we don't get lucky here" level of difficulty.

It had the unfortunate side effect of actually trivializing the content, but in a different way. The players were always "holding back". So even if the GM wanted to correctly balance things, they didn't have accurate information by which to do so.

[Quertus]

AFAICT, historically, I'm generally on the side of maximizing Player Agency, of maximizing "Delta Meaningfulness".

Here's my comments on a few of the conversations from this thread:



Wand of Magic Missile vs Wand of Grease (or "Meaningful or not")


By contrast, suppose your character can buy a wand of either magic missiles or grease.


And it could be a visible choice if and when you go back and tell the story of that campaign. That storytelling isn't just going to be 'we won', its going to be the bits you personally thought were cool or surprising or revelatory or funny. 'Remember that time we Greased the ropes on a pirate ship and half of their boarders fell into the water before they could get to our ship?'. The specifics of what people find meaningful will vary from person to person, sure. But there is still a commonality that if each person went back and told the story of what they remember of the campaign, the meaningful choices were the ones that let that person recognize their own place in that story - the stuff where the story would have been different (in the way the person cares about) if it had been some other player playing through it.


We have a winner. The how is what makes each party's story unique.


"dealing with what you've been given" as opposed to "designing the perfect thing".

Here's my problem: you get to tell a unique story whether the Wand of Grease vs Wand of Magic Missiles was a choice, or whether it was random treasure, outside the players' control. Further, those playing the "design the perfect thing" minigame / mindset are far less likely to experience anywhere near the breadth of content as those playing the randomized "dealing with what you've been given" minigame.

In this case, reducing your delta increases the story's uniqueness. So I think we need to be very careful in defining and discussing our terms, to not cross-contaminate our results with things like this exact example of the impact on "stories told after the fact" style of uniqueness vs "meaningful at the time" choices. Or perhaps differentiate "real choices" from "technical choices"? Like, it's technically a choice between those two, but given NichG's example, how many of you feel confident betting which choice would be made in that scenario?



Effort


(for me) it's about total delta vs total effort.


If I know that a choice isn't going to make much difference, then fine, I'll just make a quick decision and move on. But if a choice is present as important, I spend time agonizing over it, and then it turns out to mean very little? That's annoying.

If you find your players wasting so much time on unimportant decisions that you have to throw random encounters at them just to not die of boredom, or glossing over major choices without noticing their agency (especially ignoring their agency to get the outcome they want), it may be a sign that different people have different expectations from the game; if not, it may be a sign that the level of transparency wrt the level of "Delta Meaningfulness" should be increased.

EDIT: In other words, yes, it might make sense for there to be some correlation in a game between "effort" and "Agency / Meaningfulness". And that places where those are highly divergent might well be pain points, with specific symptoms one could watch for.



Luck


If you want rolling the dice to be meaningful, i.e. have a potential impact on the outcome, then you have to be able to win or lose by luck. Saying you shouldn't ever lose because of bad luck is equivalent to saying you should never win by luck and also that you shouldn't have luck at all, at which point you're better off playing chess. Basically if you include meaningful dice, you're making the meaningful choice to win or lose randomly.

What I'm hearing is "Combat as Sport" vs "Combat as War". CaS players are willing to leave things to chance; CaW players feel that, if the dice come out, you've already "lost", you're already in a fail state (and not just wrt "failure", but "fun gameplay").

IMO, it's entirely possible for the dice to be meaningful, yet optional, per CaW.



CaW Challenged


Agency, IMO, should never mean certainty.


Here's an example of a situation where player choice and luck both matter:

Do you have a crappy plan? Luck makes the difference between death and a costly (in terms of spell slots etc.) escape.
Do you have an OK plan? Luck makes the difference between a costly escape and a costly success.
Do you have a good plan? Luck makes the difference between a costly success and pulling it off freely.


Huh.

So, first, I must admit, although they violate the grognard, "if the dice come out, you've failed" adage, I still feel like the idea of the plan, the strategic stage, impacting the scope of outcomes at the tactical stage still falls under CaW. I'd never really considered that before. So I don't have a problem with it in principle, if the Simulation agrees that there is that logical variance in outcome.

Still, if Superman rescues Timmy from the well, or Quertus handles your finances, I don't think luck should play any part in just how costly this will be. Yes, Superman could just fly down the well and grab Timmy vs drill an entire new hole beside the well, and, yes, one is costly while the other is a free success, but that's more on Superman's strategy than the implementation. Unless Superman is wearing his pants on his head, he won't implement the free strategy in a costly manner.



More on CaS & CaW


The central problem is that some people believe that "fun, exciting gameplay" must mean that in the end it comes down to dice rolls that could go either way to create tension.

This belief is wrong but widespread. It leads to GMs trying to carefully craft combats to be just the right difficulty, to adjust DCs to make every important task a gamble, to sabotage any solutions that are guaranteed to work and give unexpected help in all hopeless situations.

But no, many players don't find that fun. The tension of a dice roll only excites the gambler type of player. Those people do exist but they are very much not a majority. There are at least as many players deriving satisfaction from solving a situation with their choices and ideas and feeling smart about it. But that can only work if those choices and ideas actually make a difference instead of just providing fluff for the inevitable dice roll.

So, "it's up to the GM to balance things" is a very CaS mindset. In CaW, that balance is actually the Players' responsibility.

Now, as some players enjoy rolling dice (myself included), it's up to us CaW gamers to (build characters who can) occasionally decide "good enough", and go forward with a plan that involves rolling some dice, if there's people in the party who are into that kind of thing.

For me, it's about gaming to find out what happens. Sometimes (often) (usually), the strategic layer of CaW makes that interesting; other times (more rarely), actually getting into the tactical nitty-gritty of playing it out is required in order to scratch that itch of playing to find out what happens.



Depth vs Breadth of Outcomes (or "you killed Kenny")

(lots of potential quotes)

At the simplest, I'd say I want both Depth and Breadth, both Potency and Variety of potential outcomes. That is to say, if we choose to interact with the "The Evil Princess has kidnapped the Dragon" plotline, I expect outcomes including "death", "took over the kingdom", "killed the princess", "married the princess", "married the dragon", "opened a dragon-seasoning business", etc, to all be on the table, and also for our actions to have "minor" ramifications wrt things like "what our reputations look like", "what the nobility's reputation looks like", "the amount of influence we have", "the amount of wealth we have", "the amount of good will (or ire/hatred/revenge) we've accumulated", "how dragonphilia shaming is treated", "what the kingdom's economic state is", etc., on top of specific "individual quest objectives" characters may bring, like "did we walk away with the Dragon's heart?", "did we steal the Evil Princess's first kiss?", "did we make Necromancy legal?", or whatever.

Do I take the red pill or the blue pill? The drink I take the pill with, do I want it shaken, or stirred? Do I want fries with that? While these decisions could impact certain aspects of the story, I don't feel like, individually, they should be life-or-death choices. But, personally, when a game takes death off the table when Simulationist logic dictates that it should be a possibility, that certainly lessens the game, for me. ... I say as a CaW player who then works to remove any chance of death (or even any need to roll the dice) from the game.

So, in short, I think decisions are at their most meaningful when they can impact the widest number of variables in the greatest number of ways, including death and whether chance even enters into the equation, but not all choices should by their nature create the greatest levels of meaningfulness.



Replacing Dice with Cards

So, I both enjoy the aesthetic of rolling dice, and "play to find out", which this removes, so I'm prejudiced against the idea. I will say, though, that it lends itself to descriptive text like "Quertus beheads the goblin with contemptuous ease" when you see that you can play a 2 and still win, so it could be good for Expression, maybe?


Or their 1 - bite the bullet and accept a miss in combat, or fail at a skill check or a save?

As a minor note, in 3e, skill checks don't auto-fail on a 1. Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named, will happily "Take a 1" (or even "take a 0") on his Spellcraft checks, and still get a triple-digit result. So the underlying system impacts how much, well, impact that choice makes. Which also brings us back to planning, CaW, or even "winning at character creation".

And I, personally, care about the "Delta Meaningfulness" at all of those levels. I even have a Playground meme of something along the lines of, "the character you choose to bring impacting the course of the Story is the first beachhead of Player Agency", or something along those lines.


I was thinking about this, and for me it comes down to micro-delta vs macro-delta.

Consider a game with a linear story where everyone has to play literally the same build. I'd call that low-delta.

But then let's say that one build is a high-level Warblade. So within combat there's quite a bit of meaningful decisions round to round. I think I would still consider that game fairly low delta, or at least not providing what I look for from a high-delta game.

Not that micro-delta is bad! It's just not enough by itself, IMO

Yeah, this card thing seems like it would tend to draw the focus to micro-delta, and away from the (much more important to me, too) macro-delta.

Sure, you can attempt to save your cards for the things that you think will allow you to affect the macro-delta (telling the Evil Princess, "you are my quest") or grant Expression or whatever your personal concerns are, but timing and implementation says that may not be and probably isn't relevant to your current set of cards as you're fighting goblins, or bandits, or goblin bandits, or whatever. So, as stated, it feels like it's usually a wash, and occasionally a ****-job waiting to happen.

OTOH, if I got handed 10 copies of each card, and replenished a full set of 20 cards each time I turned in a full set of used 1-20? Then I might feel like I had more room for choosing Expression, for being prepared for macro-agency events.

Still not sure I like the aesthetic of it, though.



Artificially Flavored, Colored, and DC'd


1. Use normally difficult traps which have no effect because of this character.

death for an entire aspect of the game (traps). If the player who has built their character to never fall into a trap never falls into a trap their build "works" but traps have become gameplay neutral as long as they are present. There is no difference between them being there and not being there other than that one player is occasionally told "oh you spotted a trap have a sweetie I guess?".

Nobody is overcoming anything at that point.

I'll jump on the bandwagon that #1 is the only acceptable answer.

Yes, the Player has the Agency to Build a Character who changes the gameplay. Changing the gameplay is kinda the natural result of Agency and Meaningfulness.

Now, yes, if Gandalf hadn't banned Transmutation, and could have just Teleported the Ring to Mount Doom, it would have been a very different story. And most people probably agree that leaving all the "wander around for 3 books" is a better story than the single paragraph "... and then Gandalf used Teleport. It was Very Effective" story. But in a question of Meaningfulness? Gandalf's ability to Teleport or not is clearly highly Meaningful. And I'm pretty sure that's the thread topic, no?

The fact that there are traps in the world, but the PC just auto-succeeds at all of them, says something about the PC. And that Expression is one of the 8 kinds of fun - one that I happen to enjoy (unlike the Challenge aesthetic that is being sacrificed to get there, btw).

[NichG]

AFAICT, historically, I'm generally on the side of maximizing Player Agency, of maximizing "Delta Meaningfulness".

Here's my comments on a few of the conversations from this thread:

Wand of Magic Missile vs Wand of Grease (or "Meaningful or not")

Here's my problem: you get to tell a unique story whether the Wand of Grease vs Wand of Magic Missiles was a choice, or whether it was random treasure, outside the players' control. Further, those playing the "design the perfect thing" minigame / mindset are far less likely to experience anywhere near the breadth of content as those playing the randomized "dealing with what you've been given" minigame.

In this case, reducing your delta increases the story's uniqueness. So I think we need to be very careful in defining and discussing our terms, to not cross-contaminate our results with things like this exact example of the impact on "stories told after the fact" style of uniqueness vs "meaningful at the time" choices. Or perhaps differentiate "real choices" from "technical choices"? Like, it's technically a choice between those two, but given NichG's example, how many of you feel confident betting which choice would be made in that scenario?


It's not the uniqueness of the story in of itself though, its the degree to which this particular story reflects that you were the only playing it rather than someone else.

Like, you could have a player whose idea of wizards is 'blaster wizard!' and the stories that involve them (if they allow agency) tend to feature things getting blown up, killed, etc - that guy buys the Wand of Magic Missiles, and maybe you can tell that this game involved them (a little bit) because stuff gets MM'd a lot. You could have a different player whose favorite kind of wizard is MacGyver and they like creative uses of magical effects so they buy the Wand of Grease, and the story then features that a bit more so maybe you can figure out that they were the player at that table.

Whereas if its random loot, you can get a unique story either way, but now the uniqueness of the story is in a way that doesn't contain information about who actually was playing. Someone who played in that game and knows that it was a random drop can't look back and say 'ah, that greased rope on the pirate ship, that was because of what I chose'.

In a formal sense, this connects with ideas of agency (specifically empowerment) as being the ability to send your future self a message via the 'environment' e.g. the events of the game. High empowerment means that you have the option to communicate all sorts of different things to your future self. Low empowerment means you can't create patterns in the environment that your future self could observe to know what their past self was thinking at the time.

[Quertus]

It's not the uniqueness of the story in of itself though, its the degree to which this particular story reflects that you were the only playing it rather than someone else.

Eh, maybe?

On the one hand, I prefer to think of it in terms of Roleplaying, of "I brought this guy instead of that attack helicopter", rather than, "I was the one who sat down at the table rather than NichG" is what made the story turn out this way. Differences in outcome that are differences between you and me aren't nearly as interesting to me.

OTOH, if different characters I ran would make different equipment choices, and that would impact the game, then, sure, I consider that part of this "Delta Agency".

But if it's a "false choice", if every character I ran would obviously buy a Wand of Grease over any other 1st level wand, then the story will always turn out the same way, no matter what character I brought.

Now, is that fair? Um... maybe? It's a measure of how much Delta Agency the module (the content) gives me, meaning it's subjective, in that the amount of Agency it gives you might be different. Perhaps it would be better to measure an absolute subjective value of "the amount of Agency arbitrary individuals have", treating every wand choice and trap option as equally valid, even if a given player would never take them. Shrug. I think both measurements are valid, but I suspect our disconnect is that I think first and foremost in terms of the subjective Delta Agency.

On the other other hand, just because I picked the Wand of Grease doesn't mean I don't imagine that other people might not do the same thing; however, the individual micro-Agency of exactly when the wand was used on exactly what, and exactly how the GM / Arangee decided that turned out, may be more important for Delta Meaningfulness than the choice of wand was in the first place. Like, if (in 2e parlance and mechanics), if I had tried the same thing as in your example, but my GM ruled that the activation time of the wand was greater than the "swing time" of the pirates on ropes, and that therefore it was impossible to catch the pirates on the ropes, all I'd get was a waste of resources and frustration at taking an ineffective action rather than your cool story / memory.

[Devils_Advocate]

It's kind of a shame that Ron Edwards went with "narrativism" here, because a clearer name might have drawn more attention, and I think that this sort of thing is intriguing stuff.

What term would you suggest?
It's always easier just to criticize than it is to improve on something, isn't it? But just from thinking about it for a few minutes, "character exploration" feels like it at least gives a better sense of the concept, though I'm still ambivalent about whether that phrase is "good enough".


Why did you trim out the one sentence in the paragraph you quoted which addressed the very question you then raised?

What ciopo's DM was doing falls squarely in the "competitive GM vs players" situation I wrote about (and not "making the game more fun"). That's how it's different.
I didn't understand why you assumed that ciopo's DM wasn't trying to make the game more fun, nor what you thought makes some difficulty increases more "competitive" or "vs. players" than others. I'm still not clear on why you leapt to vilifying the guy.

I gather that your real issue is with counteracting characters' relative strengths and weaknesses, thereby undermining the ways in which their players intend for them to relate to the setting. Because a purported customization option (e.g. to be good at stealth at the cost of being bad at fighting) is basically a lie if the actual action resolution is at odds with it. If advantages and disadvantages are supposes to balance each other out, it's dishonest to secretly rebalance things a different way. (To which I'd add that GMs might want to avoid homogenizing gameplay to keep things interesting for themselves, too!)

But "fine tuning", "learning character strengths and vulnerabilities", and "how the group will perform in various situations" feel to me like they're talking about taking specific abilities rather than overall power into account. So I still don't feel fully clear on your position. Is it that it's fine to mitigate advantages, but negating them is going too far? That seems reasonable enough, but it's not obvious to me whether that's your intended meaning.

[NichG]

Eh, maybe?

On the one hand, I prefer to think of it in terms of Roleplaying, of "I brought this guy instead of that attack helicopter", rather than, "I was the one who sat down at the table rather than NichG" is what made the story turn out this way. Differences in outcome that are differences between you and me aren't nearly as interesting to me.

OTOH, if different characters I ran would make different equipment choices, and that would impact the game, then, sure, I consider that part of this "Delta Agency".

But if it's a "false choice", if every character I ran would obviously buy a Wand of Grease over any other 1st level wand, then the story will always turn out the same way, no matter what character I brought.

Now, is that fair? Um... maybe? It's a measure of how much Delta Agency the module (the content) gives me, meaning it's subjective, in that the amount of Agency it gives you might be different. Perhaps it would be better to measure an absolute subjective value of "the amount of Agency arbitrary individuals have", treating every wand choice and trap option as equally valid, even if a given player would never take them. Shrug. I think both measurements are valid, but I suspect our disconnect is that I think first and foremost in terms of the subjective Delta Agency.

The tricky thing is that, at least when you get formal with these concepts, they all involve counterfactuals. 'I could have done X, even if I never would' counts for something different than 'X always happens, and I'm happy about that'. In a less formal sense, I would say that the feeling of making the choice is the thing - so if you're so certain of your choice that its always 100% automatic, it stops feeling like agency even if formally it counts. But if you have some uncertainty at what you want to do at all - just enough to have to think about it, even if you in the end always choose the same - and you can anticipate and confirm post-hoc that your choice did make a difference, then thats the best stuff.

[Quertus]

The tricky thing is that, at least when you get formal with these concepts, they all involve counterfactuals. 'I could have done X, even if I never would' counts for something different than 'X always happens, and I'm happy about that'. In a less formal sense, I would say that the feeling of making the choice is the thing - so if you're so certain of your choice that its always 100% automatic, it stops feeling like agency even if formally it counts. But if you have some uncertainty at what you want to do at all - just enough to have to think about it, even if you in the end always choose the same - and you can anticipate and confirm post-hoc that your choice did make a difference, then thats the best stuff.

"That's the best stuff" - I want some clarity here.

If I look at a scenario, and realize that Quertus would definitely do X, and Armus would definitely do Y, and Rei would definitely do Z, and they would all have noticeably different results, especially if those differences are measured in at least 3 dimensions, then, yeah, that's the best stuff, or at least a partial recipe there... for? thereunto? At least a partial recipe for "the best stuff".

OTOH, if the scenario is "do you apply the car battery to your genitals, yes or no?", and all of my characters would make the same choice in this binary, then regardless of how impactful that choice might be, no, I don't think that's the best stuff.

I read what you wrote as the latter; or, rather, as the latter matching what you wrote.

Also, there's the metric of "effort vs effect". If I'm not only always going to make the same choice, but also have to put effort into coming to the conclusion that I'm making that same choice, I kinda suspect I can easily view that as wasting time, as a negative compared to just "X always happens, and I'm happy about that". It depends on whether the journey itself has any [insert word here] effects, whether I learn or Express something in the journey, not just in the destination.

[gbaji]

Like, you could have a player whose idea of wizards is 'blaster wizard!' and the stories that involve them (if they allow agency) tend to feature things getting blown up, killed, etc - that guy buys the Wand of Magic Missiles, and maybe you can tell that this game involved them (a little bit) because stuff gets MM'd a lot. You could have a different player whose favorite kind of wizard is MacGyver and they like creative uses of magical effects so they buy the Wand of Grease, and the story then features that a bit more so maybe you can figure out that they were the player at that table.

Whereas if its random loot, you can get a unique story either way, but now the uniqueness of the story is in a way that doesn't contain information about who actually was playing. Someone who played in that game and knows that it was a random drop can't look back and say 'ah, that greased rope on the pirate ship, that was because of what I chose'.

I don't think that's the entirety of the issue though. There is the concept of player agency at build time (which, as discussed is important). But there's also player agency at play time. Considering the wand of magic missiles versus the wand of grease as a player purchase choice is one thing and certainly represents player agency and choice. But "what I choose to do with random loot" is also a major aspect as well, and ties into the concept of the GM allowing the players to come up with clever uses for such things.

It's one thing for the player to decide "my character will buy a wand of grease, since my concept for my character is all about figuring out how to use grease in clever ways". Great, right? But... I actually find things much more interesting when a player has no pre-made decision to go a certain way, or use a certain style of magic or method of resolution, but when faced with a specific situation, looks at their character sheet, notices this wand of grease he got in some random loot, and then figures out a clever way to use it.

It's also important for GMs to recognize when moments like that happen, and not just shut them down. It's just as much a violation of player agency for the GM, expecting the PC who is a blaster focused wizard to use his blaster focused magic to deal with the pirates boarding the ship, to say "I'm not going to allow you to use the wand of grease in that way", so as to force the player to "play the character based on the intended concept". And even if the GM doesn't go that far, it's also a potential violation of agency for the GM, knowing that this PC is a "blaster focused wizard" to intentionally put only wands that cast evocation spells into the loot pile, with the intention of "this is an item for that character", and never consider putting some other random, out of character thing in there.

Some of the best (and most memorable) character moments are when someone does something "out of character" because they picked up some random seeming item and decide to use it in a strange/interesting way. So it's not only just about GM rulings at the moment, but also GMs avoiding trying to "help the player with their chosen build" by tailoring item drops to just that build design. Heck. The GM may expect that the blaster wizard will choose to buy a wand of magic missiles over a wand of grease when given the choice. So why not hand out a wand of grease in a random treasure drop? Worse case, the PC ignores it and/or refuses to use it because "I ain't got much use for wand of grease". But that still sets up the potential of the awesome "just because I ain't got much use for it, doesn't mean I don't know how to" moment if/when it comes up (yes, Quigley Down Under reference there).

I guess this is kind of a side concept to the main topic here, but when putting in treasure (especially magic stuff) I will certainly keep an eye out in terms of PC needs/wants (cause hey. I'm a nice GM), but I also take into account "what items might the folks they just defeated or who's old storage shed they just pillaged have kept there". And yeah, I often put items in that have no direct combat purpose at all (or really any direct obvious purpose), but that are "useful" in other ways (utility stuff). So a pair of gloves from a dwarven forge that provide heat resistance. Makes sense, right? May or may not be super useful or something someone would wear all the time though. An Umbrella that magically blocks out light in an area (used by trolls in RQ maybe?). Well that may not be super useful, but might be... maybe... someday. These are not items I put in there with a specific purpose in mind ("you will need to use the umbrella to defend against the light beams protecting the vault door"), but just a "this is kind of a neat thing, that makes sense where you found it, and I have honestly no clue how/where/when you might find a use for it". In the same abandoned dwarven forge, they found a pair of tongs that magically increased the strength of the person when using the tongs to lift stuff. Had zero plan for how that might be useful (there was nothing in that dungeon/adventure that required it), but several adventures later, the person who kinda radomly got it as loot, found a use for it.

So I wouldn't say that directly adds to player agency, so much as allows for a greater breadth of potential player agency in the game. Certainly as regards to giving players "what they need/want". Sometimes, it is perfectly ok to hand PCs stuff that "doesn't fit" IMO. And as a side point, this is also why I'm not a huge fan of "magic marts" in game settings. I want my players to have things on their sheets that they would not have purchased or chosen if they had a direct choice, but that also don't cost them anything, and may very well be found to be useful later on. Think Roy with the bag o'critters. He would never in a million years purchase that item. But he's got it, and has actually found a couple of uses for it along the way. So I do think there's value in GMs not pidgeon holing the PCs in terms of loot either (or the PCs pidgeon holing themselves, or feeling that they need to if they don't trade/buy-for "appropriate gear")


I didn't understand why you assumed that ciopo's DM wasn't trying to make the game more fun, nor what you thought makes some difficulty increases more "competitive" or "vs. players" than others. I'm still not clear on why you leapt to vilifying the guy.

Because I'm 99.999% certain that no player, after having spent character/build/exp/whatever points making their disarm trap skill +10 higher, and then learning that the GM responded to this by increasing the difficulty of all of the traps in the advenure by 10 points, would ever describe that as "making the game more fun".

I suspect that most players response would be closer to "That's F'ing BS!" and be pissed off about it.

And this is not about vilifing the guy. Quite the opposite. I'm pointing out that this is something many GMs may think is ok to do, and think it's just normal "game balance", but is actually not. If folks like me don't point this out, those GMs will continue to do so, and perhaps not realize that they are making their players unhappy in the process.


I gather that your real issue is with counteracting characters' relative strengths and weaknesses, thereby undermining the ways in which their players intend for them to relate to the setting. Because a purported customization option (e.g. to be good at stealth at the cost of being bad at fighting) is basically a lie if the actual action resolution is at odds with it. If advantages and disadvantages are supposes to balance each other out, it's dishonest to secretly rebalance things a different way. (To which I'd add that GMs might want to avoid homogenizing gameplay to keep things interesting for themselves, too!)

You gather correctly.


But "fine tuning", "learning character strengths and vulnerabilities", and "how the group will perform in various situations" feel to me like they're talking about taking specific abilities rather than overall power into account. So I still don't feel fully clear on your position. Is it that it's fine to mitigate advantages, but negating them is going too far? That seems reasonable enough, but it's not obvious to me whether that's your intended meaning.

Eh... I get where you are going with this. Scenario balance/difficulty is certainly a thing. And some games (like D&D) have some very formalized rules for this. However, those are supposed to be "general difficulty" elements. So you are taking the "average expected ability level" of the PC party, and then setting the difficulty level of what they are going to encounter to levels based on that. There is nothing at all wrong with that (again, assuming you are playing in a game where that is a thing you do). But, if a specific character chose build options that increase one set of abilities to be higher than the average (whatever that is), at the cost of other abilities being lower than the average, they should gain the benefit of having that increased capability when dealing with the scenario elements that those abilities apply to (while also suffering the disadvantages for the abilities that are going to be sub par).

Look at it another way. Let's assume that by increasing disarm trap by 10 points, the same character has decreased his AC by the same value (again, relative to some assumed "party/scenario average"). Is the same GM who might be tempted to make the traps 10 points tougher also going to decrease his monsters to-hit values by 10 as well? No? Why not? The same logic should apply in both directions, but I've never heard a GM say "one of the characters gimped their AC, so I decreased all my monsters to-hit values to allow him to feel like he's effective in battle". Or, we could even speculate that the GM... what? Fudges the values, but only when attacking that one character? Not sure that's a great approach either. In fact, I know it's not.

No. Most GMs will gladly allow the PC to suffer the negatives of build choices that give them sub par values in some areas, as a natural consequence for those choices (that's player build agency, right?). And they are right to do so. But, in the same way, they are absolutely wrong to make the PC suffer the negative's of that build choice, but then also nullify the positives. That's just "not fun" for anyone (well, except maybe the GM).


BTW. This is not to say that the GM can't disallow certain build choices in session zero if they are viewed as too unbalanced/powerful/whatever for the planned scenario. Player agency should not extend to the point of making "broken characters" that will make it difficult if not impossible for the GM to handle. Now, usually this comes up in terms of absolute power level in my games, but it can also be about specific abilities/spells/items as well. Kinda depends on the specifics of the game we're playing here. It's not something that comes up much in a skill based game like RuneQuest, but it can come up in other build based games, especially if you are "building" higher level characters, since that can allow for really absurd builds that you can't really justify how they actually survived to get to that level. I've seen such builds that are so unbalanced that it does result in a character that is godly in one subset of game elements, but as a GM I'd have to actually fudge things to *not* kill the character, almost accidetntally, in any combat situation that may come up (extreme glass canons are one example of this). Since I don't like to fudge like that, I'm going to recommend in session zero that the player make some adjustments to make their character more balanced/survivable. And yes, this will have the effect of reducing whatever "godly level abilities" they were building, but that's fine IMO. There's a fine line to be walked here, but that's where open session zero conversations and setting of expectations come in.

Again though, that's very much different from a PC that is otherwise within a reasonable range of ability levels, but has taken a focus in one thiing (like traps) that is going to make that one element much much easier for the party. I have no issue with that, and I would never in a million years change the difficulty of that element in response. But I also tend to approach most things from a "what's reasonable to be here" and not a "what will challenge the PCs" way. The lock on some random merchants back door is not going to magically be more difficult to pick for the level 15 party than the level 5 party (by that I mean, that I'm not going to up the DC for the lock simply because I expect the party thief's lockpick skill is higher). I think in terms of "how much money is the merchant going to spend on locks" and that's how difficult the lock is going to be.

The only encounter balance I tend to do is upward bounded, not downward. A powerful party will regularly run into things that are vastly less powerful and not much of a challenge to them, simply because they are more powerful and the world doesn't magically become more powerful right along with them. The BBEG and minions may be more powerful, but other elements in the world will not become so. So I care about making sure that the party power level is suffient to deal with the toughest things I've written into the scenario and which they are required to deal with in order to complete said scenario, but everything else in the game world is "as difficult as it is", without consideration to party power level. So if a high power party decides to go beat up a local street gang, that street gang will not become tougher because they are higher level. They'll just womp on them. But similarly if a low power party decides to charge off and assault the Fortress of Doom(tm) and try to take out the Evil Overlord, I'm not going to make that easier for them either (yeah, they'll just die).

But I'm not going to write any element into the scenario that requires that low level party to do that. They're free to choose to do so on their own, but what I write and is "required to accomplish <whatever>" will always not be greater than their capability to manage. That's what I think of as scenario balance. And that's all that's required. Doing more micro-adjustments is dangerous for GMs to get into. Doubly so if they're responding to specific character abilities and not general party capability. If someone chooses to make a character that is good at disarming traps, let them be good at disarming traps. That should not be a threat to the GMs scenario.

[NichG]

I don't think that's the entirety of the issue though. There is the concept of player agency at build time (which, as discussed is important). But there's also player agency at play time. Considering the wand of magic missiles versus the wand of grease as a player purchase choice is one thing and certainly represents player agency and choice. But "what I choose to do with random loot" is also a major aspect as well, and ties into the concept of the GM allowing the players to come up with clever uses for such things.

It's one thing for the player to decide "my character will buy a wand of grease, since my concept for my character is all about figuring out how to use grease in clever ways". Great, right? But... I actually find things much more interesting when a player has no pre-made decision to go a certain way, or use a certain style of magic or method of resolution, but when faced with a specific situation, looks at their character sheet, notices this wand of grease he got in some random loot, and then figures out a clever way to use it.

It's also important for GMs to recognize when moments like that happen, and not just shut them down. It's just as much a violation of player agency for the GM, expecting the PC who is a blaster focused wizard to use his blaster focused magic to deal with the pirates boarding the ship, to say "I'm not going to allow you to use the wand of grease in that way", so as to force the player to "play the character based on the intended concept". And even if the GM doesn't go that far, it's also a potential violation of agency for the GM, knowing that this PC is a "blaster focused wizard" to intentionally put only wands that cast evocation spells into the loot pile, with the intention of "this is an item for that character", and never consider putting some other random, out of character thing in there.

Some of the best (and most memorable) character moments are when someone does something "out of character" because they picked up some random seeming item and decide to use it in a strange/interesting way. So it's not only just about GM rulings at the moment, but also GMs avoiding trying to "help the player with their chosen build" by tailoring item drops to just that build design. Heck. The GM may expect that the blaster wizard will choose to buy a wand of magic missiles over a wand of grease when given the choice. So why not hand out a wand of grease in a random treasure drop? Worse case, the PC ignores it and/or refuses to use it because "I ain't got much use for wand of grease". But that still sets up the potential of the awesome "just because I ain't got much use for it, doesn't mean I don't know how to" moment if/when it comes up (yes, Quigley Down Under reference there).

I guess this is kind of a side concept to the main topic here, but when putting in treasure (especially magic stuff) I will certainly keep an eye out in terms of PC needs/wants (cause hey. I'm a nice GM), but I also take into account "what items might the folks they just defeated or who's old storage shed they just pillaged have kept there". And yeah, I often put items in that have no direct combat purpose at all (or really any direct obvious purpose), but that are "useful" in other ways (utility stuff). So a pair of gloves from a dwarven forge that provide heat resistance. Makes sense, right? May or may not be super useful or something someone would wear all the time though. An Umbrella that magically blocks out light in an area (used by trolls in RQ maybe?). Well that may not be super useful, but might be... maybe... someday. These are not items I put in there with a specific purpose in mind ("you will need to use the umbrella to defend against the light beams protecting the vault door"), but just a "this is kind of a neat thing, that makes sense where you found it, and I have honestly no clue how/where/when you might find a use for it". In the same abandoned dwarven forge, they found a pair of tongs that magically increased the strength of the person when using the tongs to lift stuff. Had zero plan for how that might be useful (there was nothing in that dungeon/adventure that required it), but several adventures later, the person who kinda radomly got it as loot, found a use for it.

So I wouldn't say that directly adds to player agency, so much as allows for a greater breadth of potential player agency in the game. Certainly as regards to giving players "what they need/want". Sometimes, it is perfectly ok to hand PCs stuff that "doesn't fit" IMO. And as a side point, this is also why I'm not a huge fan of "magic marts" in game settings. I want my players to have things on their sheets that they would not have purchased or chosen if they had a direct choice, but that also don't cost them anything, and may very well be found to be useful later on. Think Roy with the bag o'critters. He would never in a million years purchase that item. But he's got it, and has actually found a couple of uses for it along the way. So I do think there's value in GMs not pidgeon holing the PCs in terms of loot either (or the PCs pidgeon holing themselves, or feeling that they need to if they don't trade/buy-for "appropriate gear")


I think this is misunderstanding the point of the example a bit? Like, I'm not saying 'its more delta when the blaster PC gets blaster stuff and the MacGyver PC gets MacGyver stuff'. It's more delta when the player can express, through the medium of the game in a way that influences its future trajectory, their choice rather than the GM's choice. If there is a situation where your PC could have taken the wand of Grease or the wand of Magic Missile, but the GM interprets your PC for you and removes that choice (even if the choice was obvious to everyone), that would be a reduction in delta.

To put it another way, at the base of this scenario the player has already made one significant choice - 'my character is a blaster' vs 'my character is a MacGyver type'. That choice is made in both the case that the PC chooses what wand to get, and the case where the GM chooses for the PC. But in the former case, the player gets an additional choice - they could for example choose to play against type, or play into type. They could, in principle, give their blaster the Wand of Grease. So in the former case, the player has two potentially significant choices whereas in the latter case they only have one. The important thing here being that it's their choice, not the GMs, even if that choice is somewhat predictable.

So a GM who hears 'I'm playing a blaster' and tries to make more stuff in the game appropriate to that isn't increasing delta by adding more opportunities to make choices, they're trying to increase delta by making the one choice have more impact. That can effectively increase delta if e.g. it causes choices that would mostly be cosmetic to end up having some consequences, but if you already have a very consequential choice then you're going to see diminishing returns. The story is already going to be influenced by the player deciding to be a blaster, whether they blast 4 enemies or 5 its kind of the same information. Also, this is where my own preference for predictable delta versus post-hoc delta makes a distinction. If I choose to play a blaster, I can predict that a natural consequence in the context of the story is 'I might solve some problems by blasting'. But could I predict within the story logic that it would mean that I'm going to find a wand of Magic Missile instead of a wand of Grease - I'd say not, at least not without the overall story being explicitly very meta. So even if the GM maybe thinks they're increasing the delta due to my original choice, they're not actually increasing the delta that I could legitimately have reasoned to be a causal consequence of my initial choice. Basically, even if it happened as a result of my choice, its not a happening that I can feel personally responsible for navigating towards, so it doesn't count for as much.

As far as what random loot looks like in an account of meaningful delta, the event of getting X vs Y from a random roll itself would have no associated delta - no choice was made. But like any scenario or context it can sometimes create opportunities for meaningful choices, e.g. 'Okay who gets this item? Who gets the next one?'. However I wouldn't say that random loot particularly creates more delta than various other forms of loot generation. It's just that if you had believed that 'I give the players things that re-affirm their roles' would have increased delta, well that would have been an incorrect interpretation of the idea and you'd end up surprised that it doesn't make things feel that much more meaningful. It's also not a violation of agency, because the loot isn't something the player had any expectation of being able to influence in the first place. It just has nothing in particular to do with agency at all because there's no choice there.

[Mordar]

I think this is misunderstanding the point of the example a bit? Like, I'm not saying 'its more delta when the blaster PC gets blaster stuff and the MacGyver PC gets MacGyver stuff'. It's more delta when the player can express, through the medium of the game in a way that influences its future trajectory, their choice rather than the GM's choice. If there is a situation where your PC could have taken the wand of Grease or the wand of Magic Missile, but the GM interprets your PC for you and removes that choice (even if the choice was obvious to everyone), that would be a reduction in delta.

To put it another way, at the base of this scenario the player has already made one significant choice - 'my character is a blaster' vs 'my character is a MacGyver type'. That choice is made in both the case that the PC chooses what wand to get, and the case where the GM chooses for the PC. But in the former case, the player gets an additional choice - they could for example choose to play against type, or play into type. They could, in principle, give their blaster the Wand of Grease. So in the former case, the player has two potentially significant choices whereas in the latter case they only have one. The important thing here being that it's their choice, not the GMs, even if that choice is somewhat predictable.

Agency only applies to places where the character has choice, IMO. The character *never* has a choice in what treasure appears (except in those instances where games/GMs are to ask their players for a treasure list to help populate loot based on the PCs needs). Just like the player never had a choice in the creatures that held the loot that contained the Quantum Wand. It is simply not in their purview. What they choose to do with the loot thereafter is...because agency, to me, is deciding what your character does, not what happens to your character. So, no player choice = no agency impact = no delta. The choice to seek out the Wand of Grease still exists.

- M

[Quertus]

Agency only applies to places where the character has choice, IMO. The character *never* has a choice in what treasure appears (except in those instances where games/GMs are to ask their players for a treasure list to help populate loot based on the PCs needs). Just like the player never had a choice in the creatures that held the loot that contained the Quantum Wand. It is simply not in their purview. What they choose to do with the loot thereafter is...because agency, to me, is deciding what your character does, not what happens to your character. So, no player choice = no agency impact = no delta. The choice to seek out the Wand of Grease still exists.

- M

Yeah. My point was just, "let's not conflate 'odds of getting this cool story' or 'ability to get this cool story' or even 'ability to get different stories (through random die rolls)' with 'Agency / Delta', because they're not the same thing". And your response is, indeed, exactly why.

[Devils_Advocate]

Naively, multiple viable options would seem to be at odds with CaW triumph through cleverness, which requires superior, winning options. The trick, of course, is that (a) there's nothing clever about picking the clearly superior choice, and (b) the various options in roleplaying games are actually pretty hard to balance. So, as it turns out, balancing stuff as well as is feasible generally serves both purposes.

It's hard to have a dilemma where, even on investigation, neither option seems better than the other. And, hey, that's fine. Trying to force that sort of situation is liable to feel, well... forced. So if that's Narrativism, maybe it's not such a great goal. On the other hand, it's easy to have a situation where different options seem better to different people.


OTOH, if the scenario is "do you apply the car battery to your genitals, yes or no?", and all of my characters would make the same choice in this binary, then regardless of how impactful that choice might be, no, I don't think that's the best stuff.
"At this point, you're given the choice of fleeing the town with either the friendly rebels or the people who just tried to give you a Viking crewcut. I only know one person who took the second option, and only because his housemate had already taken the sensible choice and they wanted to see what happened if, theoretically, one had the brain of a deck chair."
- Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, reviewing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim


And this is not about vilifing the guy.
You contrasted his methods to adjusting things "with an eye towards making the game more fun", implying that fun wasn't his goal, and characterized his behavior as competition with a player. I feel like it casts a GM in a negative light to suggest that he chooses to compete with players in a way that he doesn't expect them to like. "Vilify" may be a strong word for it, but hopefully you grasp my point. You impugned motives, not just methods.


Let's assume that by increasing disarm trap by 10 points, the same character has decreased his AC by the same value (again, relative to some assumed "party/scenario average"). Is the same GM who might be tempted to make the traps 10 points tougher also going to decrease his monsters to-hit values by 10 as well? No? Why not?
Because that makes the other PCs too hard to hit. And as a rule all player characters get involved in combat. Whereas traps may well be handled exclusively by the designated party scout, especially if that character is known to neutralize traps reliably.

(Thanks for anticipating and preemptively responding to the above reply, by the way. It makes this section of our conversation much more efficient!)


Or, we could even speculate that the GM... what? Fudges the values, but only when attacking that one character?
Gives the character an AC-boosting item that only works for him. Not too odd for a GM to throw a bone to a gimped PC like that.

But in this particular case, there is a middle path: Instead, give the party an AC-boosting item that works for anyone. And explain that enemies can generally target who they want and prioritize their most vulnerable foes, so the party is best off spreading AC around instead of concentrating it all on a few characters. And then, if they still decide to boost the full plate guy's AC, let the min/maxed character get killed; they asked for it.


Agency only applies to places where the character has choice, IMO.
Characters only have agency when they have choices, but players can have agency even when their characters don't, e.g. in determining backstory. We're generally more directly concerned with player agency.

To illustrate the difference: Suppose that a group of players decide that they want to play a sequel campaign, so the GM makes one, and the players are excited to take on the new villain now threatening the world. Their characters, on the other hand, might have opted not to defeat the previous villain if they knew that some extradimensional overdeity was going to counteract that accomplishment by replacing the old villain with a new one.

Sequels can be very unfair to characters in this way, reinstating the problems they worked so hard to solve. Sometimes this is even distinctly contrived, which feels a bit like adding insult to injury. (See Home Alone, Speed, Gremlins, etc.)


agency, to me, is deciding what your character does, not what happens to your character.
I'd say that agency is choices leading to desired outcomes, with the latter being the more important part if anything. Sartre observed that, even if fully physically restrained, one can still choose how to interpret one's situation. And that fair enough. But the sort of freedom that can't be taken away doesn't distinguish between different situations. Agency is the degree to which one can manifest one's will. Power, in short. The two terms are synonymous in their relevant senses.

[gbaji]

Agency only applies to places where the character has choice, IMO. The character *never* has a choice in what treasure appears (except in those instances where games/GMs are to ask their players for a treasure list to help populate loot based on the PCs needs). Just like the player never had a choice in the creatures that held the loot that contained the Quantum Wand. It is simply not in their purview. What they choose to do with the loot thereafter is...because agency, to me, is deciding what your character does, not what happens to your character. So, no player choice = no agency impact = no delta. The choice to seek out the Wand of Grease still exists.

Right. This is why I was cautioning about GMs trying to hard to customize loot (or other things in the game) to what they think the player wants for their charcter. That can reduce agency, despite the GM thinking they are leaning in to it.

And, as I was trying to get across with my example, it may actually increase it (to not customize things). Anything that increases the options available to PCs at any given time, has the potential to increase player agency. The player has more choices of what they may choose to do with their character. Thus, more agency. The blaster wizard can still choose to blast, but if he's got a wand of grease, and the situation makes that useful to use, now they have another choice they could make if they want.

The player thinking "I could use this wand of grease, but I really prefer blasting, so I'll just use one of my blasting spells" is using player agency in that moment to make that choice. Take away the wand of grease, and he has one fewer choice available to make (he's now just choosing from his set of blaster spells, which is the same next choice he makes in the first scenario). That's what I'm kinda getting at here. GMs should not be afraid to put things into the game that don't directly align with what the PC concepts are about. But, as with all things, it's a balance (see the counter: Putting in no undead for the anti-undead focused character to fight, or no magic sword for the swordsman, or no elveny boots for the stealth character, etc...).



You contrasted his methods to adjusting things "with an eye towards making the game more fun", implying that fun wasn't his goal, and characterized his behavior as competition with a player. I feel like it casts a GM in a negative light to suggest that he chooses to compete with players in a way that he doesn't expect them to like. "Vilify" may be a strong word for it, but hopefully you grasp my point. You impugned motives, not just methods.

I've then followed that up with multiple posts clarifying that in many cases, the GM may take an action believing that they are increasing fun, but the effect is the opposite. It's possible for the GM to fall into "GM vs players" competition without directly intending it. We had a GM for a while who really honestly believed that "wouldn't it be fun if every melee fight the PCs got into was an ambush scenario, at night, when 2/3rds of the party was asleep to really make things a challenge!", and "wouldn't it be fun to have every daytime combat involve the NPCs hiding up in the hills raining missile fire from hidden locations so the PCs can't attack back and have to take huge damage to get to the bad guys!", and "wouldn't it be fun if, after slogging through annoying combat after annoying combat like this, and finally getting to the main bad guy, he would always escape, so that he could be a fun re-occuring villian!".

Newsflash: It wasn't. Not even a little bit. But he honestly believed that by nullifying character abilities in combats (either removing armor/prep for folks sleeping, or making melee combat not an easy option), this would make things "more fun" (it certainly was more challenging, but in an annoying way). And yeah. Recurring villains is a thing that has to be handled carefully. He didnt.

And you are correct about the encounter balance issue (you mentioned this in one of your previous posts). It's a tricky thing. On the one hand, one of the jobs of the GM (in most games anyway) is to balance the encounters to be "challenging; but not impossible" for the PCs to overcome. If everything in the game is too easy, then it's also not fun for the players ("ho hum. Another set of wmipy opponents we waltzed though. We've saved the kingdom again. Yay us...."). But on the other hand, and as I've previously detailed, there are ways to up the challenge to encounters other than simply nullifying skill levels the PCs spent points for. Adding more opponents to handle by using your powerful skills/abilities/weapons/spells works well. Creating greater risk/reward for success failure can work as well. But actively crafting things so as to nullify things that the PCs can normally do is generally not a great approach IME. You can do that occasionally, but if it's all the time (like bumping the difficulty of ever trap in the game), that's not going to work well.


Because that makes the other PCs too hard to hit. And as a rule all player characters get involved in combat. Whereas traps may well be handled exclusively by the designated party scout, especially if that character is known to neutralize traps reliably.

(Thanks for anticipating and preemptively responding to the above reply, by the way. It makes this section of our conversation much more efficient!)

Yeah. Done the interwebs for a while, and it was not just an easy counter, but was literally the argument running through my own head while I wrote that. :smallsmile:

I like to run through the mental progression and mention them, even the dumb ideas along the way. For no other reason than to ensure that I don't run into the "but you didn't consider <dumb idea>!" counter.


Gives the character an AC-boosting item that only works for him. Not too odd for a GM to throw a bone to a gimped PC like that.

But in this particular case, there is a middle path: Instead, give the party an AC-boosting item that works for anyone. And explain that enemies can generally target who they want and prioritize their most vulnerable foes, so the party is best off spreading AC around instead of concentrating it all on a few characters. And then, if they still decide to boost the full plate guy's AC, let the min/maxed character get killed; they asked for it.

Eh... Yeah. I get this approach. But I think it's a less than ideal one. What you are effectively doing is re-writing the characters abilities, but without discussing it with the player. So you allow the character to be introduced with a higher disarm skill than you want, and lower AC than you think is healthy. So you respond by increasing the DC of all the traps, effectively lowering the PCs skill to what you think it should have been, and then handing the PC (or party) some item to offset/raise their AC to make it what you think it should have been. The result is the more balanced character you think the player should have created rather than the unbalanced one they actually did create.

How is that different from just changing the values on the character sheet? If the GM really thinks that the player has built an unbalanced character to the point where they may consider doing something like this, that's when you have a session zero conversation and hash this out. Allowing the character and then "adjusting" it after the fact is not the right approach IMO. If the player absolutely insists on playing this unbalanced character, despite you warning them that "your character is going to die the moment you're exposed to combat", let them play. Let them have their godly ability to disarm traps. But also let them die when a combat situation comes up in which that is the natural (unmodified) result.

It's not the GM's job to protect the PC from poor choices which the GM has previously warned them about and told them exactly what the consequences will be. As a GM, you should not be punative about this, but you should also not pull punches either. Doing so allows the player to manipulate you into allowing them their unbalanced advantages while assuming you will prevent the negatives for them. And yes, there are players who will totally play this game if you let them. Play Champions for a while and you'll see this. Heck. Any game that allows players to buy some kind of character/build points by taking flaws/disadvantages can lead to this.



To illustrate the difference: Suppose that a group of players decide that they want to play a sequel campaign, so the GM makes one, and the players are excited to take on the new villain now threatening the world. Their characters, on the other hand, might have opted not to defeat the previous villain if they knew that some extradimensional overdeity was going to counteract that accomplishment by replacing the old villain with a new one.

Sequels can be very unfair to characters in this way, reinstating the problems they worked so hard to solve. Sometimes this is even distinctly contrived, which feels a bit like adding insult to injury. (See Home Alone, Speed, Gremlins, etc.)

I think this can be a problem if the new villian is more or less a retread of the original one (or, worse, part of the same organization, like say Umbrella Corp). But IME, players have no problem with new threats showing up in the same game world/setting, and that their existing characters (or new ones if they want) now can/have-to deal with. There is no universal "happily ever after", there's the point at which the current story ends. There's always new antagonists, and a new story. IMO, that's what breathes life into a campaign world.

My players are always excited to see a new adventure, and learn what new and (hopefully) interesting thing I've come up with. And they love both playing their previous characters in these new adventures and creating new ones to play (or some mix of the two). This has just never been a problem. I mean, I can see how it could be, depending on how it's presented, but... generally speaking this is kinda why the players made adventurer/investigator characters and are playing the game in the first place. I think most players would be far more upset if I said "Ok. You defeated the big bad, and that begins a several century long peace. Your charcters never have anything else significant to do in their lives and all die peacefully of old age. Now roll up new ones for the new scenario, taking place in the future, when a new big bad comes along".

Nope. They'd much rather I continue to present new problems for their characters to deal with. At least that has been my experience.

[Mordar]

Right. This is why I was cautioning about GMs trying to hard to customize loot (or other things in the game) to what they think the player wants for their charcter. That can reduce agency, despite the GM thinking they are leaning in to it.

And, as I was trying to get across with my example, it may actually increase it (to not customize things). Anything that increases the options available to PCs at any given time, has the potential to increase player agency. The player has more choices of what they may choose to do with their character. Thus, more agency. The blaster wizard can still choose to blast, but if he's got a wand of grease, and the situation makes that useful to use, now they have another choice they could make if they want.

The player thinking "I could use this wand of grease, but I really prefer blasting, so I'll just use one of my blasting spells" is using player agency in that moment to make that choice. Take away the wand of grease, and he has one fewer choice available to make (he's now just choosing from his set of blaster spells, which is the same next choice he makes in the first scenario). That's what I'm kinda getting at here. GMs should not be afraid to put things into the game that don't directly align with what the PC concepts are about. But, as with all things, it's a balance (see the counter: Putting in no undead for the anti-undead focused character to fight, or no magic sword for the swordsman, or no elveny boots for the stealth character, etc...).

I was referring only to the Player providing the GM a list of what treasures they might like to see...I still hold that the GM selecting a particular item, for whatever reason other than such a list, does not alter the Player/Character agency because they never had any choice to make in this regard. If we're going to discuss GM domain decisions altering Player/Character agency I think there are a lot of choices that are absolutely reasonable that will be branded as curtailing agency...like the lack of a Magic Mart that doesn't have every item in every book at base list price available, or limiting spells to those appearing in first-party published books, or any of a host of other campaign structure decisions.

I absolutely agree that characters not getting things that exactly align with their stated concept can encourage innovation, I don't agree that swapping the Wand of Grease for a Wand of Magic Missiles changes the options available at all - it might alter one specific option (from Grease via Wand to MM via Wand), but firing MM from Wand is different than firing MM from a spell slot, and actually speaks back to the resource management component that was once so important in (A)D&D.

- M

- M

[gbaji]

I was referring only to the Player providing the GM a list of what treasures they might like to see...I still hold that the GM selecting a particular item, for whatever reason other than such a list, does not alter the Player/Character agency because they never had any choice to make in this regard.

We are in complete agreement on that. IMO, player agency exists in the realm of choices made by the player, with regard to character choices/actions, but within the "world" that the GM creates. And that world includes "what is there". Which in turn includes "what's in the loot pile".

That's not to say (as I've mentioned) that the GM can't lean in to presumed PC preferences/needs when considering loot, but the GM is absolutely under no obligation to specifically tailor loot to the wants/desires of the players. If a player comes up to me saying "I'd like there to be a <specific magic item> in the dragons horde", that's going to get a very funny look back from me. That's well beyond player agency IMO.

I have the same opinion on story arcs and adventure plots as well. Players may absolutely come up to me with ideas in terms of what their characters want to do. But I'm under zero obligation to make that happen for them. Most often my response will be "Ok. What is your character going to do to try to make that happen?".

I don't hand wishes to the players.


If we're going to discuss GM domain decisions altering Player/Character agency I think there are a lot of choices that are absolutely reasonable that will be branded as curtailing agency...like the lack of a Magic Mart that doesn't have every item in every book at base list price available, or limiting spells to those appearing in first-party published books, or any of a host of other campaign structure decisions.

Yup. Same/similar logic as above. Some people will, however, insist that it is a violation of player agency though, so I guess everyone's mileage may vary here. :smallwink:

I happen to believe that presenting PCs with a fair and balanced set of "this is what is there", which will never be "everything you want/desire", allows for much more interesting play. It also creates avenues for PC initiated quests for "things that aren't available in the local magic mart". IMO this enables player agency, since it gives them things they want/need, but can't just get handed to them, so they have to actually.... you know... play things out in the game to get/accomplish them.

Getting handed exactly what you want every time you want it is not actually an enhancement of agency. And IMO, most players will rapidly become bored with the result.


And yes. I'm fully aware that some of this can come off as a kind of arrogant "I know better what the players really want than they do" bit. But that's not actually it. What I do often know better is what will make for a game that is more engaging and enjoyable long term than most players do. Especially players who insist that "player agency" requires me to hand them whatever loot they ask for, and ensure that every adventure I write is scripted to result in their own magic happy rainbow ending complete with the exact pot of gold they asked for.

That's... not going to happen. I create a game setting with people, places, and things in it. You want something? Figure out how to get it. Player agency comes in that whatever decisions and actions you make will be honestly accessed within the context of the game setting, and the results will be fair and reasonable. And yeah, I'll even work with the players quite a bit to facilitate their plans and objectives (at the very least giving hints in terms of what might work, might not, definitely wont, etc).


Heck. This happened, just last night, in a game sesson. One of the players at the table brought up another old character of his, that had been kinda stuck/cursed some time ago (not in the current adventure) and was kinda updating me on what this character was doing off in the background, and was lamenting the problems his character was likely experiencing as a result of his cursed condition (there is actually a really long history of this character, how he got into his condition, who did it, the pretty darn significant and nasty retribution he enacted in response which lead to an entire empire being in turmoil and civil war for a few decades, and he'd basically really leaned in to the whole situation in the past). I honestly hadn't thought about the character in some time, and it had never come up directly (was a different GM that created the issue in the first place, and we play in a semi-open world). But we were in a scenario where the topic came up as to what was going on with this character (and the whole civil war kinda finally dying down and him deciding to bug out before things got really bad for him). But yeah. I put on my thinking cap and suggested a few different places/people he could go to which would likeliy result in removal (or at least mitigation) of the curse. He was very happy, and left the topic saying he'd think about what he'd have that character do in response.

Done. Easy. Point being that when his character was initially aflicted (it was an attempt to kill him by folks involved in an evil plot, who had used him for a part of it and wanted to silence him), he responded by embracing his curse, and then launching into his revenge. Now that's that's over, his priorities and objectives have changed a bit, so he want's to go in a different direction. Informing him of the potential cure back then was not done for two reasons: 1. I wasn't the one running things at the time, and 2. he seemed to really be enjoying this whole "revenge against those who harmed me, and their little dogs too!", so it seemed inappropriate to get in the way of that (actual player agency at work there). But once he decided he was done, and was looking for solutions, now I'm going to step in and provide options for that path.

Note. I didn't create a solution out of thin air. That solution was always available within the rules (but a player might not have thought of it). I just provided that information to him now that his character is spending time and effort looking for a solution. His character can research and discover the solution, now that the player has decided to have his character actually do that. IMO, that's how player agency should manifest.

[NichG]

The blame angle isn't so useful here I think. What you do might piss a player off, or not, depending on so many different things. So stuff like 'is choosing not to have a magic mart curtailing player agency?' I think is not a very useful way to frame things.

The better framing is to say, as a GM you want to design a campaign that the players can find meaningful. This delta theory suggests that if you want to do that, you need to ensure there are a good number of ways for the choices of the players to change the direction of events (my addition: in ways that they can reasonably anticipate those changes when deciding what to do, and in ways they can look back and say 'my choice made this happen').

That doesn't mean that the best thing to do is to make every single choice with an eye to maximizing the total possible delta, always. But it means that if you find that your campaign seems to not feel meaningful, a place to look to diagnose that is 'do my players have opportunities to make choices that change the direction of things, and can they understand the consequence of those choices before they make them, and are the consequences of their past choices legible in how things currently are going?'. And then adjust the number or style of agentic decisions correspondingly, until 'my players don't find the campaign meaningful' isn't your biggest issue. Or, while designing the campaign in the first place (or any homebrew stuff, or the system, or in choosing what things to focus on), look for places where it would be easy for you to draw the gameplay towards potential choices that could be meaningful, and just use the existing stuff more efficiently. Or more broadly, adopt ways of looking at the campaign structure as a whole that make it easier to have those sorts of meaningful choices happen - in the sense of elements you can reliably pull in that are rich in these sorts of choices.

But like, 'according to this idea, my GM sucks because they didn't let me go shopping, and that would have been an agentic choice' isn't really a sensible criticism. Were there lots of other agentic choices you had other than this one? Then there's still plenty of opportunity for meaning, just maybe not in this particular thing in this particular way.

[KorvinStarmast]

The blame angle isn't so useful here I think. What you do might piss a player off, or not, depending on so many different things. So stuff like 'is choosing not to have a magic mart curtailing player agency?' I think is not a very useful way to frame things. +1


...you need to ensure there are a good number of ways for the choices of the players to change the direction of events (my addition: in ways that they can reasonably anticipate those changes when deciding what to do, and in ways they can look back and say 'my choice made this happen'). I like a mix of both. Sometimes, since the world also acts independently of the characters beyond their zone of influence, they can do things that have a ripple effect elsewhere and then discover "wait, what? When we did this that happened?" Mostly apply the other version (linkage to "in zone of influence" stuff) but I usually provide a lot of "what's going on in the world" news tidbits such that the ripple effect stuff fits into the lore for that campaign.


... look for places where it would be easy for you to draw the gameplay towards potential choices that could be meaningful, and just use the existing stuff more efficiently.
And the chance of failure, or making a poor choice, needs to be available. It is possible to have choices and still make poor ones, or ones that have a chance to fail, that have consequences. My Salt Marsh group did that, made a choice, and in making that choice the clock kept ticking and the foe was better prepared when they got around to dealing with him ... and it really wasn't their fault. They chose to delay a day so that the druid could cast scrying. Had the saving throw failed, it would have provided some very useful/key information. But since the save was made (highly improbably, but the score was a 20) that info wasn't available when they began to execute their plan. But they are pretty good at adapting so I doubt they will not eventually uncover the larger problem that they are currently unaware of.

...my GM sucks because they didn't let me go shopping, and that would have been an agentic choice' isn't really a sensible criticism. Concur.

[NichG]

+1

I like a mix of both. Sometimes, since the world also acts independently of the characters beyond their zone of influence, they can do things that have a ripple effect elsewhere and then discover "wait, what? When we did this that happened?" Mostly apply the other version (linkage to "in zone of influence" stuff) but I usually provide a lot of "what's going on in the world" news tidbits such that the ripple effect stuff fits into the lore for that campaign.

Well again, in the theme of the previous post, its not that 'all things must be this', its that 'you should have some of this'.

You can have choices whose outcomes are surprising or unpredictable. Those are in a sense less agentic choices for the players, but they serve a different purpose of making it seem that the world also has agency. You can want your campaign to pull off both having meaningful choices for the players and feeling alive and inhabited, that's not incoherent. So some of the stuff you add will serve the one purpose, some will serve the other, some will serve both simultaneously, etc.

[Mordar]

The blame angle isn't so useful here I think. What you do might piss a player off, or not, depending on so many different things. So stuff like 'is choosing not to have a magic mart curtailing player agency?' I think is not a very useful way to frame things.

*looks around for blaming* Did I miss it? Is this like that "shaming" thing?


The better framing is to say, as a GM you want to design a campaign that the players can find meaningful. This delta theory suggests that if you want to do that, you need to ensure there are a good number of ways for the choices of the players to change the direction of events (my addition: in ways that they can reasonably anticipate those changes when deciding what to do, and in ways they can look back and say 'my choice made this happen').

That doesn't mean that the best thing to do is to make every single choice with an eye to maximizing the total possible delta, always. But it means that if you find that your campaign seems to not feel meaningful, a place to look to diagnose that is 'do my players have opportunities to make choices that change the direction of things, and can they understand the consequence of those choices before they make them, and are the consequences of their past choices legible in how things currently are going?'. And then adjust the number or style of agentic decisions correspondingly, until 'my players don't find the campaign meaningful' isn't your biggest issue. Or, while designing the campaign in the first place (or any homebrew stuff, or the system, or in choosing what things to focus on), look for places where it would be easy for you to draw the gameplay towards potential choices that could be meaningful, and just use the existing stuff more efficiently. Or more broadly, adopt ways of looking at the campaign structure as a whole that make it easier to have those sorts of meaningful choices happen - in the sense of elements you can reliably pull in that are rich in these sorts of choices.

But like, 'according to this idea, my GM sucks because they didn't let me go shopping, and that would have been an agentic choice' isn't really a sensible criticism. Were there lots of other agentic choices you had other than this one? Then there's still plenty of opportunity for meaning, just maybe not in this particular thing in this particular way.

Please explain "...understand the consequence of those choices before they make them...". My immediate reaction was "doesn't this require accurate prediction of the outcome of the choice?"

I am approaching this discussion from the standpoint of "If your group wants this style of campaign" in all elements, and I think certain games might lend themselves better to this sort of campaign than others (from the Duh! file). The biggest sticking point I seem to have is the idea of agency in outcomes (or "destiny") or the idea of "I didn't choose that outcome, so I didn't have agency".

- M

[KorvinStarmast]

Well again, in the theme of the previous post, its not that 'all things must be this', its that 'you should have some of this'. I agree.

You can have choices whose outcomes are surprising or unpredictable. Those are in a sense less agentic choices for the players, but they serve a different purpose of making it seem that the world also has agency. You can want your campaign to pull off both having meaningful choices for the players and feeling alive and inhabited, that's not incoherent. So some of the stuff you add will serve the one purpose, some will serve the other, some will serve both simultaneously, etc. Yes. It all contributes to the 'feel' of a game and of a campaign.

As an aside, or as an example: one of the things that the GM can do, for Blades in the Dark, is consult the tables for "so what were the other factions doing while the Crew did this?" We found this very helpful in making the city of Doskvol "come alive" since the position of various factions wasn't static.
In our case, the Grey Cloaks make a successful move to take over a territory that was too close to our lair, and where we had done a few scores, so we moved our lair. We had lost some rep with them and didn't need additional complications from that quarter, plus we had just gotten a little more territory elsewhere.

Another thing we found out was that if we switched one of the players to GM from Player, we kept the Crew together and the new GM more or less picked up where the old one left off. He had the tools to both carry on our old arcs and open up new ones. (Our current problem is the infamous "Scheduling!" bogey.

[NichG]

*looks around for blaming* Did I miss it? Is this like that "shaming" thing?

Talking about players blaming the GM for curtailing/failing to provide specific avenues of agency like magic marts. E.g. when you said "I think there are a lot of choices that are absolutely reasonable that will be branded as curtailing agency..." that shifts things a bit towards talking about what players will criticize (branding as) rather than about the GM trying to make their campaign have good stuff in general. And since gbaji also responded in that direction with multiple paragraphs about players feeling agency being curtained vs getting exactly what they wanted vs knowing what they want or not, well, it felt reasonable to point out that this doesn't have to be about what people will criticize for at all.



Please explain "...understand the consequence of those choices before they make them...". My immediate reaction was "doesn't this require accurate prediction of the outcome of the choice?"

I am approaching this discussion from the standpoint of "If your group wants this style of campaign" in all elements, and I think certain games might lend themselves better to this sort of campaign than others (from the Duh! file). The biggest sticking point I seem to have is the idea of agency in outcomes (or "destiny") or the idea of "I didn't choose that outcome, so I didn't have agency".

- M

Yes, if you can accurately predict the outcome of the choice, that (for me) will feel much more agentic. It completes a loop - 'I wanted to drive the car to the left, so I turned the steering wheel, and indeed the car went to the left!'. If I want to drive the car to the left, turn the steering wheel, and it goes to the right instead then I might feel like my actions are having an impact, but not that I have agency over the motion of the car.

That doesn't mean that all things in the campaign always have to be like that. It means that the campaign should contain some things like that. It is also allowed to contain things that are not like that too! It's somewhat additive - the presence of the latter doesn't diminish the value of the former (unless its so much so that it drowns it out, or goes strongly against players' expectations of where they should have agency - like the GM talking for their characters or things like that - so that the absence is attention-grabbing)

[KorvinStarmast]

That doesn't mean that all things in the campaign always have to be like that. If they all are, the campaign can easily become "push button, get banana" and lose some of the depth and creativity that surprises and unexpected outcomes offer.

I wonder if we are discussing agency or control?

[NichG]

If they all are, the campaign can easily become "push button, get banana" and lose some of the depth and creativity that surprises and unexpected outcomes offer.

I wonder if we are discussing agency or control?

As far as formal mathematical definitions of these things go, they're tightly interconnected.

[Quertus]

If one GM gives you the option between [Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue], while a second lets you choose between [Commoner, Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue], you have more options under the second, but is that really significantly more usable agency for the average Playgrounder? And what about a third GM who offers [Commoner, Expert, Adept, Warrior, Noble, Druid] - that’s even more options than the first two, right? Or consider a 4th GM who gave you homebrew choices of [Monk of the North, Monk of the South, Monk of the East, Monk of the West, Monk of the Sea, Monk of the Sky, Traveling Monk]? Or a 5th who let you choose between eight options: [Transmuter, Necromancer, Abjurer,… you get the idea.

What if you really love your parents, and want to run a character with that same mindset, but your options are to run a Commoner, or a Barbarian who slew their parents in a fit of rage, or a Cleric who slew their parents as heretics, or a… you get the idea. Even if they *technically* let you choose any class, they’ve set things up such that the choices you’ll use are quite limited.

And this is not unlike adding limits to stores. If a store sells apples, bananas, and carrots, you have the option to buy ABC, and/or to grow ABC (and/or to steal, travel elsewhere, etc etc). But if the store only sells Apples, you have reduced the players options to buying A, and/or growing ABC (and etc). Reducing options reduces options, plain and simple. It’s egregious doublespeak to try to claim that reducing options somehow increases options.

Note that juxtaposition of ideas. Yes, I recognize full well that there’s a difference between options players might reasonably take, and “fake” choices. Yet, even so, “buy vs craft your own” is a real choice, such that different players, different characters, and different campaigns will produce different results.

There is a different feel between “craft your own because you choose to” and “craft your own because you have to”. Sure. But realize that, to railroad that feel, you’ve reduced options, lowered agency, and spent effort. If a GM’s going to spend effort, as a rule I’d prefer they spend it on increasing player agency over decreasing it, y’know? And I certainly don’t want the GM spending effort on doublespeak trying to claim that reducing agency somehow increases it, or worse, on convincing themselves that that lie is true.

Now, is “maximum agency, all the time” optimal? No, even I’ve pointed out ways it’s not, and NichG has already made smarter, saner comments than you’ll get out of me on this specific subtopic, so I’ll not “reiterate it, but worse”.

Instead, I’ll simply point out that limiting agency is limiting agency; the GM should be aware of this, and should use the utmost care when their actions serve to limit agency. IME, most GMs I’ve observed limiting agency (“this town doesn’t sell X”, “core only, for balance”, whatever) would have run a better and more coherent game had they instead just allowed everything. IME, most GM’s world building really is just that bad. Because once you introduce such limits, it introduces the opportunity to ask, “why?”, and, odds are, the GM isn’t going to have produced a good enough answer to hold up to scrutiny, especially if they’re not the foremost expert at the table in every field involved in producing that answer.

So “delta agency” isn’t just a good tool to use to ask, “have I really given my players the opportunity to make meaningful choices”, it also serves as a test for places to ask, “am I sure this will have the effect I intend? Will core only really produce balance? Will making all these encounters ambushes really make things more fun? Does a town that doesn’t sell food really make sense?”. Done right, limits can create themes and increase fun, even while reducing agency. Just… they’re rarely done right, IME. So handle them with appropriate care, and admit they reduce agency. If a GM can’t even see that, it’s doubtful they can see enough to otherwise understand and predict their impact. Which is part of why I’ll poke at even such early game (pre-game) abridgments of agency, to see if the GM has the mindset and the skill to handle them appropriately.

[kyoryu]

Please explain "...understand the consequence of those choices before they make them...". My immediate reaction was "doesn't this require accurate prediction of the outcome of the choice?"

I am approaching this discussion from the standpoint of "If your group wants this style of campaign" in all elements, and I think certain games might lend themselves better to this sort of campaign than others (from the Duh! file). The biggest sticking point I seem to have is the idea of agency in outcomes (or "destiny") or the idea of "I didn't choose that outcome, so I didn't have agency".


You do not need to be able to predict with 100% accuracy the outcome of every choice, no.

If you choose to back the Brotherhood of the Blade over the Sisters of the Staff, you should be able to predict:

1. You'll go on missions to help the Brotherhood out.
2. If you are successful, there's a better chance the Brotherhood will succeed in whatever struggle is happening
3. If the Brotherhood wins, they'll exert influence in a manner consistent with the known character of the Brotherhood, unless another another event happens (internal conflict, etc.). If the Brotherhood doesn't like magic, for instance, they might enact policies to suppress magic. We might not know what those policies are - they could be anything from "nothing" to potentially "kill all mages" - but we should have an idea of how extreme they are likely to be, and we wouldn't expect to see mages raised to being the rulers of everything by the Brotherhood.

It's fairly important in this type of game to not overly-negate the choices of players with "behind the scenes" stuff. If the players decide to depose the Duke of Badness because he's going to start a war, his successor probably shouldn't start that war. The successor might do other bad stuff, but having them just go ahead and do the thing the players didn't want to happen feels like you're negating their choices and impact.

Players have some input into how things develop - so do you, as the GM, via your NPCs. The "scale" of the PCs should also impact how much impact they have on any given thing - street rat PCs probably aren't going to have much impact on who the King is. But a bunch of noble knights should be able to severely impact the future of a small town's politics if they decide to get involved. The best games of this type are ones where the adversaries are at roughly equal level, probably slightly tougher, so that it's an uphill battle but the PCs can have a notable impact.

[KorvinStarmast]

It's fairly important in this type of game to not overly-negate the choices of players with "behind the scenes" stuff. If the players decide to depose the Duke of Badness because he's going to start a war, his successor probably shouldn't start that war. Or the successor could start a war with someone else/different, for different reasons (and possiblhy reasons that the PCs are on board with).


The best games of this type are ones where the adversaries are at roughly equal level, probably slightly tougher, so that it's an uphill battle but the PCs can have a notable impact. Agree. I am running into the problem of the Tier 3 PCs dealing with an issue that involves some serious friction between two kingdoms, but they are approaching the point where we either end the campaign or we have to begin 'dealing with beings from other planes' things.

[Mordar]

Talking about players blaming the GM for curtailing/failing to provide specific avenues of agency like magic marts. E.g. when you said "I think there are a lot of choices that are absolutely reasonable that will be branded as curtailing agency..." that shifts things a bit towards talking about what players will criticize (branding as) rather than about the GM trying to make their campaign have good stuff in general. And since gbaji also responded in that direction with multiple paragraphs about players feeling agency being curtained vs getting exactly what they wanted vs knowing what they want or not, well, it felt reasonable to point out that this doesn't have to be about what people will criticize for at all.

Ah. This was about expectations, I think, and what makes "agency" and what makes "good stuff" and what, if any, is the overlap. For what it is worth, meaningful choices to me are going to be of the "do we kill the Baron or trust to the courts?", "Do we help the farmers or help the elves?", "Do we join that strange Thieves' Guild or do we keep working for this Du Lac guy?". Loot division, shopping, things like that, are seldom meaningful in the long run, and that's probably informed my snipe.


Yes, if you can accurately predict the outcome of the choice, that (for me) will feel much more agentic. It completes a loop - 'I wanted to drive the car to the left, so I turned the steering wheel, and indeed the car went to the left!'. If I want to drive the car to the left, turn the steering wheel, and it goes to the right instead then I might feel like my actions are having an impact, but not that I have agency over the motion of the car.

That doesn't mean that all things in the campaign always have to be like that. It means that the campaign should contain some things like that. It is also allowed to contain things that are not like that too! It's somewhat additive - the presence of the latter doesn't diminish the value of the former (unless its so much so that it drowns it out, or goes strongly against players' expectations of where they should have agency - like the GM talking for their characters or things like that - so that the absence is attention-grabbing)

The ability to accurately predict the outcome does not, to me, relate to agency. You and I don't get to control outcomes in our lives outside very narrow bands. Your car explanation tracks within those narrow bands, but pulling back focus to a broader outcome - say, "I want to make our dinner reservation on time, so I am going to turn left down 6th because it will be faster than going down Broadway" and then running in to an accident delay that pushes us back 15 minutes. I did not achieve the desired and reasonable outcome, and yet in no instance was my agency curtailed.

Now, I suppose in a game where our party wanted to rush to a destination to intercept the bad guys and the Bad GM intentionally tossed up obstacles on any path we tried to take other than the one that ran through the ambush we might have a legitimate beef - one accident delay is luck, but an accident delay plus a sudden street fair plus a house on fire plus a little old lady walking 30 ducks across the road is something else.

So yes, things should work out the way we plan sometimes, and not other times. But it would be nice if people (self included) also recognized that failure is agentic when you make decisions...

- M

[gbaji]

Talking about players blaming the GM for curtailing/failing to provide specific avenues of agency like magic marts. E.g. when you said "I think there are a lot of choices that are absolutely reasonable that will be branded as curtailing agency..." that shifts things a bit towards talking about what players will criticize (branding as) rather than about the GM trying to make their campaign have good stuff in general. And since gbaji also responded in that direction with multiple paragraphs about players feeling agency being curtained vs getting exactly what they wanted vs knowing what they want or not, well, it felt reasonable to point out that this doesn't have to be about what people will criticize for at all.

Yeah. It's not just about what people may criticize for. I think that's definitely something to try to avoid (when the criticisms are realistic and reasonable, of course). I think the better approach is to just normally always respond to any player request/idea/suggestion by asking "Is this something that can exist/happen in the game setting?". If the answer is "yes", then ask "Ok. How could this thing exist/happen in the game setting?". And then move towards making that happen.

But my approach is that these steps are informational. Actions require... well... action. Someone has to do something to make that thing happen/exist in the game setting (again, assuming this isn't something that's already there by default). And that's where a bit of almost negotiation should happen between the GM and the player. "So you want to play a Troll in Human Town. Ok. Well, there aren't Trolls normally living in Human Town, but Trolls do exist in the setting. The nearest Troll Town is 500 miles away. Let's work out some backstory for your character that would explain why this Troll is hanging out in Human Town and has decided to work with the <mostly human> other members of the party".

I've actually found that almost without fail, by going through this kind of process, the player actually comes up with a really great backstory for the character, the game world gets expanded on a bit, interesting details and motivations show up, additional ideas for adventures pop into my head, etc. Things that might not have happened if I'd just accepted the troll character and said "Ok. You're hanging out with everyone else at the local bar, when...."

Similar deal with item requests. It's quite rare in my game (we tend to do a decent job at handing out relevant and useful loot, and RQ is a much more flexible game in many ways for this sort of thing), but on the occassion a player comes to me and says "Gonthor the mighty is quite skilled, and reasonably mighty. But his armor kinda sucks. I'd like to see if there's anything I can do about this". Now, in response, I might look at the stock solutions. What resources does Gonthor have? What groups/guilds in the area may be able to fashion magic/enchanted armor for him (and can he pay in some way?). Gonthor's been adventuring a while now, and has a number of reasonably powerful friends and allies. He may have started as a barbarian from the wastelands, but he's a barbarian with serious worldwide contacts now, so there's possibilities here. So that's one avenue. Or... if that's not sufficient or feasible (maybe Gonthor spent all his money on other things), perhaps he speaks to the local high priest of his deity and is pointed in the direction of some old rumors and legends of a hero long ago who possessed mighty armor that no man could cleave (probably an exaggeration, but we all know how ancient folks just loved to do that). Now, we've got a quest thingie going on. I can totally work with that and in fact love to work with that because now the player has provided me with an adventure hook to use. I don't have to come up with some random bad guy of the season to be a problem, and I have a great excuse to run Gonthor and his adventuring buddies all over the place, tracking down ancient clues and whatnot, so he can get some decent armor and not constanty faceplant everytime he decides to go berserker warrior or something.

Again. If I'd just looked up some WBL chart and said "well here's your +3 armor, cause that's what you should have now", it would be... well... boring. Same deal with magic marts. Gonthor will just cash in the dozen or so items he has that are interesting and occassionaly useful, for the armor he wants, and he's done. Again. Boooooring. This way, we get a whole adventure out of this (and there'll probably be other treasures as well), Gonthor gets some niftey new duds, and he's still got those other items that maybe aren't armor, or a weapon, but provide some other odds and ends that actually flesh out his character as well.

Yeah. I'm just not a fan of magic marts for a number of reasons. The above is one. But a side effect is that it even more narrow focuses characters than many games already do. I like the fact that, over time, my characters will pick up a number of random magic items that have nothing at all to do with my "character concept". Those don't detract from anything, they add to it. But if you introduce a magic mart, then the expectation is that these items are just cash to be traded in for things that are directly in line with said character concept (and in some games, you're basically holding yourself back if you *don't* do this). Yeah... not a fan. I think those odds and ends items are what add extra flair to characters. It's what distinguishes this level 12 fighter form every other level 12 fighter. Otherwise, we're left with generic stat/item blocks and not actual unique characters.



Yes, if you can accurately predict the outcome of the choice, that (for me) will feel much more agentic. It completes a loop - 'I wanted to drive the car to the left, so I turned the steering wheel, and indeed the car went to the left!'. If I want to drive the car to the left, turn the steering wheel, and it goes to the right instead then I might feel like my actions are having an impact, but not that I have agency over the motion of the car.

That doesn't mean that all things in the campaign always have to be like that. It means that the campaign should contain some things like that. It is also allowed to contain things that are not like that too! It's somewhat additive - the presence of the latter doesn't diminish the value of the former (unless its so much so that it drowns it out, or goes strongly against players' expectations of where they should have agency - like the GM talking for their characters or things like that - so that the absence is attention-grabbing)

Yeah. As with all things, it's a balance of factors. To me, agency is 100% about what the PCs choose and the actions they take. That agency diminishes gradually as we move from "direct results" to "less direct results" to "indirect results" and so on. Obviously, if you turn the car left and it doesn't go left, that's a violation of agnecy. Also, if you turn the car left, and it goes left, but turning left doesn't get you to the freeway onramp you were trying to get on, that's also a violation of agency (slightly less, but still a major problem). To follow the analogy, you should have full control of the car, and be able to navigate where you want to go on the roads with that car. Now, whether you get to your destination before someone eles does is more of a question. Whether there are other drivers/traffic which might get in your way is also an issue.

The flip side though, is that if every time you try to drive somewhere you get a flat tire (yeah, still using the analogy), you're going to start to get (quite reasonably) annoyed. If every time you drive to the store, it's closed, same deal. At a GM, you can (and should) have obstacles that need to be overcome to achieve desired outcomes (that's what makes the game actually fun/interesting to play). But those obstacles must be reasonable and "fit" the setting being played in. If the player starts to feel like you're just forcing them to wade through sand to get anywhere, they're going to not appreciate that at all.


But yeah. Gimme gaming isn't fun either. So finding something in between that works for the players is the key.

[icefractal]

Re: Magic Shops (and support services from NPCs in general, such as casting for hire) -

They increase player options while present, but if you want to have the PCs become major players in the setting on a personal level (as opposed to a political level), then they're going to hit a point where they outstrip the available shops / services and have to mostly rely on themselves or on arrangements with specific allies.

For example, say you set up the level curve like:
Common (1-4), Uncommon (5-8), Rare (9-12), Legendary (13-16), Mythic (17-20)

That's already a taller (as in, higher level NPCs) curve than many people say they follow ("most NPCs are 0-level"), although in practice I find that claim is usually false for NPCs where their level actually matters. If the 15th level PCs piss off a rich noble and he sends 12th level "hired thugs" after them, then it doesn't matter how theoretically low-level are some background NPCs, this is a world where 12th level is still "hired thug" territory. So when I say "9th+ level is rare", I mean it - nobody can have an "army" of 10th level soldiers, because there simply aren't the people to fill it.

So this has upsides for the PCs - getting to high levels substantially changes their relationship with the rest of the world, and people can't just be "prepared" for the kind of abilities they have, because both those abilities and their counter-measures are extremely rare.

But it does also have downsides - since Mythic is "so rare that even most sages doubt they exist" then True Resurrection is not something that's going to be available for purchase. Because as far as almost anyone knows, it's not even a spell that exists! Raising the dead perfectly without a trace of the body? That's not mortal magic, that was either divine intervention or faked. (And yes, being able to do it yourself would be enough to convince most people you're a divine avatar). Even finding someone who can Raise Dead is a non-trivial task and you're probably facing a fair amount of competition for their services.

So this impacts magic items as well, obviously. For items that need a high-level crafter, there's very few being made, and the people making them probably have all the gold they want anyway. Sure, occasionally they're lost in battle and then found, and could be sold, but the supply will be very scarce, and most buyers won't put them back in circulation.

To me (as a player) that's worth it - I'd rather have the potential to become a world-shaker (by my own abilities, not by fate) and have to make my own items or do without, than to be a well-supplied Shadowrunner - powerful on a personal level, but ultimately an ant to the Powers That Be.

But I'd agree that if the premise is "You're ants to the Powers That Be and always will be, and magic items aren't for sale," then that's the worst of both worlds.

[NichG]

Ah. This was about expectations, I think, and what makes "agency" and what makes "good stuff" and what, if any, is the overlap. For what it is worth, meaningful choices to me are going to be of the "do we kill the Baron or trust to the courts?", "Do we help the farmers or help the elves?", "Do we join that strange Thieves' Guild or do we keep working for this Du Lac guy?". Loot division, shopping, things like that, are seldom meaningful in the long run, and that's probably informed my snipe.

The ability to accurately predict the outcome does not, to me, relate to agency. You and I don't get to control outcomes in our lives outside very narrow bands. Your car explanation tracks within those narrow bands, but pulling back focus to a broader outcome - say, "I want to make our dinner reservation on time, so I am going to turn left down 6th because it will be faster than going down Broadway" and then running in to an accident delay that pushes us back 15 minutes. I did not achieve the desired and reasonable outcome, and yet in no instance was my agency curtailed.

I would strongly disagree with this. The cases we fail to control things in our lives are extremely salient and shocking, so you might overemphasize them in your memory, but 99% of the time we're controlling things in our lives extremely well and it just passes without notice. I want to eat pasta tonight, all sorts of stuff happens during the day, but I still end up eating pasta tonight. I want to be in London next week - a ridiculously complex chain of collaboration has to happen between people, involving things like my bank agreeing to transfer currency to the airline, the airline getting the information that 'this person has bought a ticket' to the places it needs to be so that I'm allowed on the plane, the mechanics fixing up the plane, the pilot flying it competently, me making it to the airport on time, etc, etc.

Despite the incredibly complexity of that chain of events, it only actually results in 'I'm not in London the week I planned to be' like 5% of the time at most. I might get there an hour late, I might be missing my luggage, I might have financial troubles down the road because I bought an overly expensive airline ticket, but 'going to London' is something that people with a few thousand dollars and some mode of transportation to the nearest airport can *just do*, and generally speaking it just happens.

If I went and made a plane reservation to London, but then my car was crushed under a tree and I couldn't go, yeah I would feel that my agency has been curtailed. Not by any sort of person, just, here's a decision about an outcome that I *expected* to be able to make, and now I cannot. The contrast between expectation and reality is what makes this a case where my agency is *curtailed*, versus simply not existing in the first place.

So it doesn't mean I can control the majority of things I see in front of me. And it doesn't mean that if lots of stuff happens in the world that I can't control, my agency has been curtailed. But this is also why I was saying to move the focus away from things being *curtailed*, and more onto providing agentic decisions. Fixating on stuff being curtailed caps the experience of the game to the existing expectations of the players, it doesn't let you actually go above and beyond that and make a game in which players get to have the experience of expecting *not* to have agency over something and then discovering that they do in fact have it.

And again, I feel like I have to repeat this, its not about one 'virtue' applied to all things in a game. It is not our job as GMs to avoid the sin of curtailing a player's agency. It is our job as GMs to provide interesting, evocative, and meaningful gameplay. *Giving* agency is a tool to achieve that end. It is not the only tool. But we don't need to call all good things player agency and all bad things railroading, and insist all things be optimized on that one spectrum.

But I would say that if you gave me a game constructed to make sense under the philosophy of 'you don't control most of your life' - not just using it as an offhand explanation about one thing or another not being controllable, but as an overarching pattern, then yeah I would likely not find participation in that game meaningful even if you give me thousands of choices. That's what I'm saying about the choices needing to be informed, and that informed nature necessarily meaning that the choices grant some ability of control - a thousand choices that don't do anything, or a thousand choices all of which have unpredictable outcomes, is - to me - no choice at all.



If one GM gives you the option between [Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue], while a second lets you choose between [Commoner, Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue], you have more options under the second, but is that really significantly more usable agency for the average Playgrounder? And what about a third GM who offers [Commoner, Expert, Adept, Warrior, Noble, Druid] - that’s even more options than the first two, right? Or consider a 4th GM who gave you homebrew choices of [Monk of the North, Monk of the South, Monk of the East, Monk of the West, Monk of the Sea, Monk of the Sky, Traveling Monk]? Or a 5th who let you choose between eight options: [Transmuter, Necromancer, Abjurer,… you get the idea.

What if you really love your parents, and want to run a character with that same mindset, but your options are to run a Commoner, or a Barbarian who slew their parents in a fit of rage, or a Cleric who slew their parents as heretics, or a… you get the idea. Even if they *technically* let you choose any class, they’ve set things up such that the choices you’ll use are quite limited.


The mathematical formalism I tend to use for agency (coming from information theory through empowerment stuff by Daniel Polani; stuff about semantic information from David Wolpert; and into a sort of recently solidifying view from Martin Biehl) sort of resolves these 'bunch of bad choices' situations. But I think it would be hard to actually talk about that precisely here unless everyone is comfortable with information theory.

Basically, in this framework, an 'agent' is part of a system that is more efficiently described and predicted by talking in terms of its goals, as opposed to talking in terms of its microscopic physics. So e.g. its easier to talk about a person who is thirsty doing things to get a drink than it is to talk about a neuron-level description of their brain and cell-level descriptions of their biology that end up implementing the 'you feel thirsty', 'you stop prioritizing what you're doing and go get a drink' sorts of behaviors.

So agency is a measure of how well something's actions can be predicted from their goals, conditioned on the information they can possibly possess about the environment. If they know nothing about the environment (e.g. none of their choices are informed), then the only actions that you can predict from their goals are the actions that basically 'always work' regardless of context - which is a much more limited set, and often empty, compared to the actions they can take if they have enough information to conclude that the actions will successfully advance their goals. This is the connection to control - the model we use to talk about things as agents is to assume that they take actions they believe will control the world to achieve their goals, and then we look back and say 'what actions would those be?' and to the extent that that actually works and is accurate, its *useful* to describe those things as agents as opposed to just dynamical physical systems or whatever.

Then, if we want to talk about agency independent of a specific agent, we have to introduce some sort of distribution over goals that someone could reasonably have. That is to say, we imagine 10000 players all being given that choice. If everyone would always make the same choice in that case, then the choice does not give us information about the specific player out of the distribution of all players - basically, observing that choice does not actually help us predict the player's other actions in the future, nor does knowing the particular player's goal make any difference in predictive power in this situation.

This generalization, that we want to talk about the agency of a scenario independent of the specific player playing it, is what creates these sort of corner case counter-examples. If we had a specific player in mind, we could look at agentic decisions as being those moments of the game where that player passing through those moments and making choices actually teaches us things about the player we did not already know. And that will depend on the alignment between the decisions and the player's particular goals (which also include OOC things like having fun, mind you). But, if we have some sense of the distribution of players and their goals, we can still talk about things which are likely to be agentic given that distribution (and may just hit or miss on given players).

[Mordar]

I would strongly disagree with this. The cases we fail to control things in our lives are extremely salient and shocking, so you might overemphasize them in your memory, but 99% of the time we're controlling things in our lives extremely well and it just passes without notice. I want to eat pasta tonight, all sorts of stuff happens during the day, but I still end up eating pasta tonight. I want to be in London next week - a ridiculously complex chain of collaboration has to happen between people, involving things like my bank agreeing to transfer currency to the airline, the airline getting the information that 'this person has bought a ticket' to the places it needs to be so that I'm allowed on the plane, the mechanics fixing up the plane, the pilot flying it competently, me making it to the airport on time, etc, etc.

Despite the incredibly complexity of that chain of events, it only actually results in 'I'm not in London the week I planned to be' like 5% of the time at most. I might get there an hour late, I might be missing my luggage, I might have financial troubles down the road because I bought an overly expensive airline ticket, but 'going to London' is something that people with a few thousand dollars and some mode of transportation to the nearest airport can *just do*, and generally speaking it just happens.

Rather than just disagree, I will reframe: The majority of things we can control in the world are trivial and self-facing. This isn't to say we are puppets/pawns/always subject to the whims of fate, rather it is to say we can control decisions we make, but we can control little of events outside of ourselves. In this era, eating pasta, going to London, getting plastic surgery, ordering a new video game...these are trivial and self-facing. Even so, I likely cannot control the quality of the pasta in a restaurant, the annoying person sitting next to me on the plane, the exact time and date the surgeon is available, or the quality of the game. Imagine the difficulty of most of those things 100+ years ago...control becomes much less likely.

Enter other bodies with agency into the picture and the controllability of outcomes decreases significantly, particularly if they have motivation to interact. I have the agency to pump fake, drive right and pull up for the 7' jump shot, with full intention of banking it off the glass and in. How many factors now come in to play about the outcome of that decision/action? How many more if instead of 1-on-1 we're playing 5-on-5? How much is that magnified by taking on the evil wizard and his band of demons from beyond to stop them from their plot to overthrow Good King Bron?


If I went and made a plane reservation to London, but then my car was crushed under a tree and I couldn't go, yeah I would feel that my agency has been curtailed. Not by any sort of person, just, here's a decision about an outcome that I *expected* to be able to make, and now I cannot. The contrast between expectation and reality is what makes this a case where my agency is *curtailed*, versus simply not existing in the first place.

So it doesn't mean I can control the majority of things I see in front of me. And it doesn't mean that if lots of stuff happens in the world that I can't control, my agency has been curtailed. But this is also why I was saying to move the focus away from things being *curtailed*, and more onto providing agentic decisions. Fixating on stuff being curtailed caps the experience of the game to the existing expectations of the players, it doesn't let you actually go above and beyond that and make a game in which players get to have the experience of expecting *not* to have agency over something and then discovering that they do in fact have it.

I was surprised by the array of definitions I just read discussing agency. Several do imply outcome, though most focus/limit to the capacity to act. I think we are on the adjacent ends of that array. I disagree that you agency was curtailed...other than there being conditions beyond your control (agency) to prevent, like the wind/beaver/momentum resulting in that tree meeting that car...just that your outcome did not meet (reasonable) expectations. As I suggested about the ambush scenario...if you had 4 back up plans and all 5 efforts met with uncanny failure, then there is something amiss.


And again, I feel like I have to repeat this, its not about one 'virtue' applied to all things in a game. It is not our job as GMs to avoid the sin of curtailing a player's agency. It is our job as GMs to provide interesting, evocative, and meaningful gameplay. *Giving* agency is a tool to achieve that end. It is not the only tool. But we don't need to call all good things player agency and all bad things railroading, and insist all things be optimized on that one spectrum.

But I would say that if you gave me a game constructed to make sense under the philosophy of 'you don't control most of your life' - not just using it as an offhand explanation about one thing or another not being controllable, but as an overarching pattern, then yeah I would likely not find participation in that game meaningful even if you give me thousands of choices. That's what I'm saying about the choices needing to be informed, and that informed nature necessarily meaning that the choices grant some ability of control - a thousand choices that don't do anything, or a thousand choices all of which have unpredictable outcomes, is - to me - no choice at all.

Strongly agree with the first. Philosophical framing on the second...I would never suggest that as a philosophical underpinning of a campaign. But if we're both playing a relatively unconstrained game (like an RPG) using a wide array of dice, involving other players, and actors within the game that have different motivations, and I reassure you that we'll follow almost all of the rules and conventions of the game, I think that would match both of our expectations.

Why? Because failure to hit the dragon, or climb the wall, or beat the bad guy to the McGuffin by evading his ambushers would be the result of your character's skill, luck, and your skill as a player to deploy options, tactics and strategies to mitigate that luck. And I wouldn't drop trees on your car to stop you from going to London (unless the Angry Awakened Beaver was your sworn enemy, of course).

- M

[NichG]

Rather than just disagree, I will reframe: The majority of things we can control in the world are trivial and self-facing. This isn't to say we are puppets/pawns/always subject to the whims of fate, rather it is to say we can control decisions we make, but we can control little of events outside of ourselves. In this era, eating pasta, going to London, getting plastic surgery, ordering a new video game...these are trivial and self-facing. Even so, I likely cannot control the quality of the pasta in a restaurant, the annoying person sitting next to me on the plane, the exact time and date the surgeon is available, or the quality of the game. Imagine the difficulty of most of those things 100+ years ago...control becomes much less likely.

Enter other bodies with agency into the picture and the controllability of outcomes decreases significantly, particularly if they have motivation to interact. I have the agency to pump fake, drive right and pull up for the 7' jump shot, with full intention of banking it off the glass and in. How many factors now come in to play about the outcome of that decision/action? How many more if instead of 1-on-1 we're playing 5-on-5? How much is that magnified by taking on the evil wizard and his band of demons from beyond to stop them from their plot to overthrow Good King Bron?

I was surprised by the array of definitions I just read discussing agency. Several do imply outcome, though most focus/limit to the capacity to act. I think we are on the adjacent ends of that array. I disagree that you agency was curtailed...other than there being conditions beyond your control (agency) to prevent, like the wind/beaver/momentum resulting in that tree meeting that car...just that your outcome did not meet (reasonable) expectations. As I suggested about the ambush scenario...if you had 4 back up plans and all 5 efforts met with uncanny failure, then there is something amiss.


This still feels to me like you're in a 'defend my choices' position rather than a 'understand how to make something good' position. Like, what does it matter what's realistic 100 years ago? Lets say you run a game set in Dark Sun and everyone is a slave and basically 95% of what the players want to control they have no hope of ever controlling. Well, that's definitely defensibly verisimilitudinous based on the setting and genre. But that wouldn't prevent a player from saying 'you know, I don't feel like anything we're doing here matters', and it wouldn't prevent this particular theory from suggesting a way you could fix that. Would the fix be in tension with trying to run grim and gritty Dark Sun realistically given the setting conceits? Yeah, that's a thing that can happen. Sometimes when you over-optimize towards realism you sacrifice fun.

Similarly, it doesn't require an adversary to say that agency was curtailed. There doesn't have to be something amiss. Sometimes your agency just gets curtailed because of random stuff - that doesn't mean it wasn't curtailed. Its an event that happened, we don't need to say like 'no one is out to get you, so you still have all your agency see?'. We can acknowledge the reduction in agency and move on. A tree falling onto my car curtails my agency even if the tree is not maliciously trying to prevent me from going to the airport. The malice perspective only makes sense to me in the viewpoint of defending your choices to your players as a GM and not wanting to be blamed - again, why I'm saying to really systematically reject the 'is this blameworthy?' framing of game design. Defensive designs tend to be really bland, whether its fear of something being unbalanced or fear of players accusations or whatever - I cannot recommend that approach. It may take conscious effort not to fall into.

Or if this is a wider philosophical point, then I guess my response is 'yeah, I think the average human life in the modern world is more meaningful than the average human life 100 years ago, and thats because there are more choices we can make and things we can achieve if we decide to'. We're less likely to just randomly die of a disease when we're 12, or spend 5 years building up a farm to have it be ransacked by the army of a neighboring province whose baron wants a little more power or whatever.



Strongly agree with the first. Philosophical framing on the second...I would never suggest that as a philosophical underpinning of a campaign. But if we're both playing a relatively unconstrained game (like an RPG) using a wide array of dice, involving other players, and actors within the game that have different motivations, and I reassure you that we'll follow almost all of the rules and conventions of the game, I think that would match both of our expectations.

Why? Because failure to hit the dragon, or climb the wall, or beat the bad guy to the McGuffin by evading his ambushers would be the result of your character's skill, luck, and your skill as a player to deploy options, tactics and strategies to mitigate that luck. And I wouldn't drop trees on your car to stop you from going to London (unless the Angry Awakened Beaver was your sworn enemy, of course).

- M

Its kind of mu? Those assurances aren't at the right scale to actually tell me anything about the availability of meaningful decisions in the campaign. I mean, I have some confidence in my ability as a player to create novel unanticipated directions and push on them, but that's either me being nice to the DM or me being cruel to the DM depending on the DM. Even then, there are lots of factors that will determine if this is going to be a game denser in meaningful choices or less dense, and 'I will follow the rules' isn't really relevant to those factors. Is there a tight timeline and an existential threat to the extent that characters differing in priorities are just wrong, or is there a lot of give around the edges of the scenario for players to even differ on what a desirable outcome looks like? Is it a world more focused on realism, coupled with a historical era that makes the ability to actually make changes highly unrealistic, or is it a campaign centered around a flashpoint where something is collapsing or making way for the new, and there are all sorts of opportunities suddenly coming into being?

[kyoryu]

I was surprised by the array of definitions I just read discussing agency. Several do imply outcome, though most focus/limit to the capacity to act. I think we are on the adjacent ends of that array. I disagree that you agency was curtailed...other than there being conditions beyond your control (agency) to prevent, like the wind/beaver/momentum resulting in that tree meeting that car...just that your outcome did not meet (reasonable) expectations. As I suggested about the ambush scenario...if you had 4 back up plans and all 5 efforts met with uncanny failure, then there is something amiss.

At the extreme, ability to act without impacting outcome is just railroading.

The trick is that you can't generally control outcome, though you should be able to influence it. Not perfectly, and in some cases that might be thwarted, but you should have influence, and you should be able to see that.

[Mordar]

This still feels to me like you're in a 'defend my choices' position rather than a 'understand how to make something good' position. Like, what does it matter what's realistic 100 years ago? Lets say you run a game set in Dark Sun and everyone is a slave and basically 95% of what the players want to control they have no hope of ever controlling. Well, that's definitely defensibly verisimilitudinous based on the setting and genre. But that wouldn't prevent a player from saying 'you know, I don't feel like anything we're doing here matters', and it wouldn't prevent this particular theory from suggesting a way you could fix that. Would the fix be in tension with trying to run grim and gritty Dark Sun realistically given the setting conceits? Yeah, that's a thing that can happen. Sometimes when you over-optimize towards realism you sacrifice fun.

I'm not sure if you mean me specifically in "defend my choices", and I'm not sure what you're suggesting with the "understand" line. So I'll assume the most generic and generous interpretation.

What does it matter? It matters because the likelihood of the outcome you desire from each of those actions is radically changed based on the era in which we live, but your agency is unaltered.

Help me with the point of the Dark Sun example - I 100% agree with the final line, and I would certainly want to both run and play in a game where we actually did have a chance to throw off the shackles...but if we failed it wasn't ultimately because we didn't have agency.


Similarly, it doesn't require an adversary to say that agency was curtailed. There doesn't have to be something amiss. Sometimes your agency just gets curtailed because of random stuff - that doesn't mean it wasn't curtailed. Its an event that happened, we don't need to say like 'no one is out to get you, so you still have all your agency see?'. We can acknowledge the reduction in agency and move on. A tree falling onto my car curtails my agency even if the tree is not maliciously trying to prevent me from going to the airport. The malice perspective only makes sense to me in the viewpoint of defending your choices to your players as a GM and not wanting to be blamed - again, why I'm saying to really systematically reject the 'is this blameworthy?' framing of game design. Defensive designs tend to be really bland, whether its fear of something being unbalanced or fear of players accusations or whatever - I cannot recommend that approach. It may take conscious effort not to fall into.

If I said adversary I didn't mean to...I don't see that I did. I said other bodies...others acting in the same world/space, even without consideration of their goals or intentions. Something amiss was in reference to being in a game where everything you try (other than perhaps the one solution the Bad GM decided upon) is blocked. Using that in your car trip to the airport was reaching for the point that if everything aligned against such a trivial action you're probably in a movie or game where someone has scripted your inability to make it to the plane on time.

The tree no more curtails your agency than someone has curtailed my agency by making it so I cannot teleport or fly under my own power. The falling tree made it such that your car was not a functional conveyance. Your choice to drive to the airport has failed to achieve the desired outcome. Now you must make a new choice.

Where is this blame thing coming from? Defensive design? Either as a player or a GM I expect and accept a given framework of reality in which we can make our decisions. Without that framework, we might be playing something more akin to little kid imagination games (said absolutely without prejudice), but I presume we're discussing RPGs as traditionally represented by D&D, VtM, Star Frontiers, whatever. If this a G vs N issue at the root?


Or if this is a wider philosophical point, then I guess my response is 'yeah, I think the average human life in the modern world is more meaningful than the average human life 100 years ago, and thats because there are more choices we can make and things we can achieve if we decide to'. We're less likely to just randomly die of a disease when we're 12, or spend 5 years building up a farm to have it be ransacked by the army of a neighboring province whose baron wants a little more power or whatever.

As mentioned above - same agency (well, maybe not quite depending on the flavor of plastic surgery) but different likelihood of outcome aligning with intent.


Its kind of mu? Those assurances aren't at the right scale to actually tell me anything about the availability of meaningful decisions in the campaign. I mean, I have some confidence in my ability as a player to create novel unanticipated directions and push on them, but that's either me being nice to the DM or me being cruel to the DM depending on the DM. Even then, there are lots of factors that will determine if this is going to be a game denser in meaningful choices or less dense, and 'I will follow the rules' isn't really relevant to those factors. Is there a tight timeline and an existential threat to the extent that characters differing in priorities are just wrong, or is there a lot of give around the edges of the scenario for players to even differ on what a desirable outcome looks like? Is it a world more focused on realism, coupled with a historical era that makes the ability to actually make changes highly unrealistic, or is it a campaign centered around a flashpoint where something is collapsing or making way for the new, and there are all sorts of opportunities suddenly coming into being?

I think I better understand this point now...more about the framework of the story than the options that exist within the rules. If I am following, you're suggesting that a game that is "Escape the Nostromo" has less baseline opportunity for agency as you use it than does a game of "Political Intrigue in World of Darkness Chicago" wherein you are playing the role elder vampires...assuming all other things being equal.

Both, to me, can be great or not-so-great. Frankly, even heavily scripted games can be much more "good stuff" than wide open games with PCs as the World Shakers. Because this is just one slider on what can make a game great or not-so-great, and the players bring in a third axis on all of those sliders.


At the extreme, ability to act without impacting outcome is just railroading.

The trick is that you can't generally control outcome, though you should be able to influence it. Not perfectly, and in some cases that might be thwarted, but you should have influence, and you should be able to see that.

I never said impact, I said you can't control outcome. In fact, I stated (or at least implied in pretty clear terms) that you can improve your chances of success by your actions. So, in effect, we're on 100% the same page.

- M

[Quertus]

So agency is a measure of how well something's actions can be predicted from their goals, conditioned on the information they can possibly possess about the environment.

Eh, I don't think I agree on this.

So, first, here's what I heard: If we give people the core 3e D&D classes, and the players say they want to run a jock, a nerd, and a woodsman, and you instinctively think of a class or two that fit that, and, after reading over the core classes they do indeed make choices that match your list of expected classes, then they had Agency, they had the Agency to make choices based on their goals that were predictable.

And I disagree that that's a good measure.

If, at the beginning of the school year, a very small boy meets a girl and decides he likes her, he may, IRL that I can think of, declare that he likes her, say that she's cute/pretty/whatever, give her a gift, not talk to her, punch her / throw rocks at her, declare that he's going to marry her some day, punch anyone else (especially boys) who talk to her, and I'm bored listing examples.

Point is, given his goal, you cannot predict his response much beyond "treat her differently". Yet he clearly has Agency to (attempt to) pursue his goals in a great many ways.

On the other side of the spectrum, if you have a Cunning Strategist (TM), about the only thing you can guarantee is that you won't be able to predict their actions given their goals.

To hit that from the flip side, determining goals based on actions? My classic example is, "(when it looks like combat may begin) Armus moves to place himself between <person with better defenses> and <threat(s)>". The only one of the 6 (or so) goals that Armus has in taking that action that Playgrounders have (accidentally?) divined in all the years I've mentioned it is (in 3e parlance), "Armus was provoking a response, in order to enable his own Sense Motive roll, to gather information about the <threat(s)>".

Still, given that goal, could you have predicted that Armus would choose to implement that goal by choosing to "move to protect <individual with better defenses>", when there's so many ways he could potentially have accomplished that same goal?

Further, so many other goals might well map to that same action (Armus, after all, has 6 (or so), so we know there's at least that many, and I can think of plenty more).

So I feel this is only true for the naive case, that how well we can predict someone's actions is only high when they have "just enough" agency to be predictable; give them sufficiently more agency (where they have more valid approaches to achieve the same goal), or sufficiently less (where they don't know enough to make an informed decision so their choice is effectively random, or their options don't give them the agency to pursue their goal).

Have I completely missed the mark? Are we talking about remotely similar things?

[NichG]

I'm not sure if you mean me specifically in "defend my choices", and I'm not sure what you're suggesting with the "understand" line. So I'll assume the most generic and generous interpretation.

I guess I'm picking up on a lot of things of the form 'but I still think its reasonable to do X' or 'but X makes sense because of realism'. Since I'm not saying 'don't do X', I'm saying 'maybe consider also doing Y', it feels odd. Also, justifying X on the basis of reasonableness or realism or whatever doesn't answer 'X isn't a thing of type Y, and things of type Y may help players form meaningful connections to a campaign', its kind of a non-sequitur.


What does it matter? It matters because the likelihood of the outcome you desire from each of those actions is radically changed based on the era in which we live, but your agency is unaltered.

Strong disagreement here. Your agency absolutely is a function of your environment as well as your self. Someone in a prison cell has less agency than the exact same person as king of a country.



Help me with the point of the Dark Sun example - I 100% agree with the final line, and I would certainly want to both run and play in a game where we actually did have a chance to throw off the shackles...but if we failed it wasn't ultimately because we didn't have agency.

If I said adversary I didn't mean to...I don't see that I did. I said other bodies...others acting in the same world/space, even without consideration of their goals or intentions. Something amiss was in reference to being in a game where everything you try (other than perhaps the one solution the Bad GM decided upon) is blocked. Using that in your car trip to the airport was reaching for the point that if everything aligned against such a trivial action you're probably in a movie or game where someone has scripted your inability to make it to the plane on time.


Right, but this idea that the thing that makes it agency or not is 'whether its amiss' is what I mean by a defensive position. Like, trying to say that a reduction of agency that's justified isn't a reduction of agency. But in the case of the tree, no one is doing it, so there's no 'justification'. It's still a reduction of agency. Without my car I have less agency than I have with it (reduction); and, I expected to have that agency but now I don't (curtailment). It has nothing to do with a GM, because there is no GM here. There doesn't have to be a GM doing a bad thing for agency to be reduced.

I had 5 bits of agency, now I have 4.5 bits of agency. My agency is now less than I thought it was. That's it.



The tree no more curtails your agency than someone has curtailed my agency by making it so I cannot teleport or fly under my own power. The falling tree made it such that your car was not a functional conveyance. Your choice to drive to the airport has failed to achieve the desired outcome. Now you must make a new choice.


I now have less agency than I thought I had, based on my model of the world. So I experience my agency being *curtailed*, as opposed to just experiencing my agency being relatively small compared to a person with a car. My model of the world does not include 'I should be able to teleport', so not being able to teleport is not my agency being *curtailed*. But certainly my agency is less than it would be if I could teleport. Gaining the ability to teleport would be an experience of my agency increasing (well, specifically my empowerment) in an unexpected way. My agency, specifically, would also increase if I actually decided to put my teleportation ability towards pursuing some goal, which would almost certainly happen.

It's just a measure. Things we find reasonable or unreasonable can increase or decrease that measure equally well.



Where is this blame thing coming from? Defensive design? Either as a player or a GM I expect and accept a given framework of reality in which we can make our decisions. Without that framework, we might be playing something more akin to little kid imagination games (said absolutely without prejudice), but I presume we're discussing RPGs as traditionally represented by D&D, VtM, Star Frontiers, whatever. If this a G vs N issue at the root?


No? Maybe? Its an issue of something being a non-sequitur. Like, if you run a game with some rule that ends up making everyone at the table bored, 'sorry but that's the rule' won't make people not find it boring. If your design goal is to make your players not bored, you might need to change the rule. Saying 'well, we have to have rules or we're playing imagination games' is sort of... dodging responsibility for the design choice? Rejecting the premise? Something like that...

Like, if I found myself trying to run a really realistic game about being medieval peasants but reached the conclusion 'gee, it wouldn't really make sense for these characters to actually be able to get away with much or change things, everything I can think of involves basically some noble ordering them around in various ways', then I'd say 'aha, maybe I shouldn't try to run realistic games about medieval peasants - that setting conceit isn't helping me run a fun game, its getting in the way. Instead maybe I'll run a realistic medieval game where the PCs are all second sons of noble houses, that will give them more options and more ability to direct the course of events, so it'll be more interesting.'

Similarly, the Dark Sun example, the conclusion I'd draw is 'oh, doing a slave start without an escape or slave rebellion happening within the first few games might have been a mistake; that's not going to give the players very many meaningful choices. Maybe I need to add something that the players know that their masters don't, that will make sure they have some leverage - game starts with them having heard some blackmail information, or the assassination plans of one noble towards another, or something valuable that they can decide who to give it to and what to trade it for. Ah, now they have some ability to pursue their own goals even though they're still slaves at the start.' Doesn't mean they can just say or do anything or beeline towards any goal, but now they have some actions which have predictable outcomes and which can change the course of the story and navigate them towards some goals (including freedom if they like). I didn't need to remove all of the non-agentic X stuff about the setting (characters are slaves, lots of being told what to do, etc) as long as I ensure that there's agentic Y stuff that can have significant and at least somewhat predictable impacts.


As mentioned above - same agency (well, maybe not quite depending on the flavor of plastic surgery) but different likelihood of outcome aligning with intent.

So this seems to be our irreducible disagreement. To me, this is very much not the same agency. Having less chance that outcome aligns with intent directly means you have less agency, as I see and experience agency.

A game that gave me lots of what you're calling agency but none of what I'm calling agency (e.g. something where there are lots of choices, but those choices have very little in the way of predictable outcomes that align with the sorts of goals I might choose to have) would be very unsatisfying to me. It becomes like the classic example of a false choice: 'you can go left, or you can go right, but nothing you can observe here about either path even reasonably hints at what lies along them'.



I think I better understand this point now...more about the framework of the story than the options that exist within the rules. If I am following, you're suggesting that a game that is "Escape the Nostromo" has less baseline opportunity for agency as you use it than does a game of "Political Intrigue in World of Darkness Chicago" wherein you are playing the role elder vampires...assuming all other things being equal.

Both, to me, can be great or not-so-great. Frankly, even heavily scripted games can be much more "good stuff" than wide open games with PCs as the World Shakers. Because this is just one slider on what can make a game great or not-so-great, and the players bring in a third axis on all of those sliders.


For me, the heavily scripted game might as well not be played (or alternately its not so heavily scripted that I can't force other things to matter on my own, in which case that's how I will play if I find myself in that position - possibly to the frustration of the GM).

Like, you can have other things that are good about a game, but this one is a multiplier. If there are some (what I'm calling) agentic choices, then that can multiply other aspects like how inspiring or evocative or interesting the game is, or how the challenges feel to navigate. Give me some Y, and you can have your X. But if you set that Y to zero, or make it so small that I'm feeling bottlenecked on it, well I'd rather read the awesome bits in a book or watch it in a movie because any motivation I have to actually participate goes away.

If someone tells me 'I want to run a heavily scripted thing', my first question is going to be 'how do you feel about me trying my hardest to break that script?'. If thats a problem, I won't play. If they say 'well I will make sure you don't, I won't play. If they're like 'sure, I'm just using the script because I'm out of ideas' I'll say 'okay, I'll make sure to play someone who is proactive and gets into enough trouble that you can be more reactive'.


Eh, I don't think I agree on this.

So, first, here's what I heard: If we give people the core 3e D&D classes, and the players say they want to run a jock, a nerd, and a woodsman, and you instinctively think of a class or two that fit that, and, after reading over the core classes they do indeed make choices that match your list of expected classes, then they had Agency, they had the Agency to make choices based on their goals that were predictable.


Specifically, if they made choices that my specific knowledge of those players as compared to other players let me predict better.

Like, if there's a choice where I think Quertus will pick A *because* A enables A* and I think Quertus likes A*, but, dunno, kyoryu would pick B because it enables B* and I've heard kyoryu talk about B* a lot, then that choice (assuming its binary) gives me ~1 bit of information about whether my player is Quertus or Kyoryu - and it does so in the context of a model of those people as being driven by particular goals (A* vs B*).

If its a choice between 2 things, but every player will pick A, then there's no mutual information between the random variable corresponding to the choice, and the random variable corresponding to the goal. Even if conceivably someone could pick B, and it would make a huge difference to do so, my prior that someone would ever pick B is basically zero, so I as the external observer don't learn anything about the player from their choice - they just confirm my preconception that everyone will always pick A.

In the extended view, I have an unknown player, they pick A in the case where some go A and some go B, and that tells me that in the future when choosing between C and D, they will pick D, because A and D both lead to goal A* and B and C both lead to goal B*. That's the utility of the measure - the expected agency associated with a choice is telling me how much additional power I will gain to predict the future behavior of that player on the basis of what they choose here. E.g. it measures how much that option teaches me about the player. Or, turning it around, it measures how much opportunity for expression that choice gives the player.

There's some give in the definitions between actual prediction and post-hoc explanation, because it takes a sort of omniscient view rather than something strictly temporally ordered. I think proper causal versions could be constructed, but this gets way into some mathy weeds (if I start talking about which filtrations to apply to the distributions over which to evaluate choices, I seriously doubt it's going to make what I'm saying any clearer, even to me...) and anyhow whether you'd want to or not depends on the particular application, which is generally much broader than tabletop campaign design...



And I disagree that that's a good measure.

If, at the beginning of the school year, a very small boy meets a girl and decides he likes her, he may, IRL that I can think of, declare that he likes her, say that she's cute/pretty/whatever, give her a gift, not talk to her, punch her / throw rocks at her, declare that he's going to marry her some day, punch anyone else (especially boys) who talk to her, and I'm bored listing examples.

Point is, given his goal, you cannot predict his response much beyond "treat her differently". Yet he clearly has Agency to (attempt to) pursue his goals in a great many ways.


Note that those examples are a very small set of actions compared to all things they could possibly do. If you can at all increase the probability you assign to those specific things and decrease the probability you assign to other, unrelated things, then that KL divergence is the information gain you've gotten about the boy's actions from learning their goal. The number of bits you gain here is going to be surprisingly high, even if it seems that the predictions aren't amazingly specific, because we're looking at the difference between two relatively large numbers. If you reduce a million possible actions down to a thousand possible actions, thats ~10 bits worth of information - quite a lot for a single choice!

Furthermore, when you see how the boy treats her differently, that gives you information that narrows down the boy's goal in a way that makes the next prediction even better.


So I feel this is only true for the naive case, that how well we can predict someone's actions is only high when they have "just enough" agency to be predictable; give them sufficiently more agency (where they have more valid approaches to achieve the same goal), or sufficiently less (where they don't know enough to make an informed decision so their choice is effectively random, or their options don't give them the agency to pursue their goal).

Have I completely missed the mark? Are we talking about remotely similar things?

I think its the gap between colloquial discussion and actual quantitative math. Like, with the 'cunning strategist' its not that the agency measure would be low, its that the cunning strategist specifically is trying to obscure their true goal from their enemies. But a strategist who is so cunning that they fail their true goal just to make sure no one ever could have known it isn't such a cunning strategist in the end. From the point of view of the mathematical analysis, there is a 'true goal' or 'best fit goal' and you can do the analysis at the point after all is said and done, then look back at the actions that led there and treat it like a compression task - 'could I describe these actions more efficiently by just literally saying each one, or by saying that they were taken by a cunning strategist who eventually managed to become king?'. Regardless of how cunning the strategist is, there are fewer action sets that lead to becoming king than there are possible action sets, so knowing that they eventually became king (or wanted to become king) always tells you something and helps you compress the explanation of the system better, unless them becoming king was really just totally random.

Whether it tells you enough to pay for the additional information you have to include to *use* the goal, that's trickier. But generally humans are very comfortably within that bound. Even surprisingly non-agentic things tend to just sit at the edge of the bound rather than being far on the wrong side of it - like, 1700s and 1800s physics has all of these variational accounts of things like 'light wants to take the shortest path' which if you calculate it out, is basically neither more or less efficient than writing down something like Snell's Rule. So its zero gain giving an agentic account of even something like a photon, not like a massive loss. Then when you get more complex systems, you can start to suffer more of a loss if you draw the boundary wrong, but the gain when you draw the boundary right gets bigger. This has to do with modularity and something called 'non-trivial informational closure' - if you just have a single degree of freedom, you can't really subdivide it much, so all accounts of it are equally efficient more or less. But when you have many degrees of freedom, if the dynamics are modular, you can find subsets of variables which very efficiently predict other members in the same subset; but which don't necessarily predict (or are predicted by) variables outside of the subset.

Those closures correspond, in general, to places where you can gain efficiency in modelling a system by discarding irrelevant details. So the agentic picture is one particular kind of closure whose summary statistics are 'goals', and where the particular set of variables under consideration are sensor states, goals, actions, and memory.

Not sure if getting into this formalism is actually useful for the tabletop discussion? If you want more precision than I might be able to deliver off the top of my head, this is the most recent paper about this particular direction: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.01619

[gbaji]

I think this discussion is veering off into tangents about broad definitions of the world "agency", and kinda missing how the word is typically applied in a RPG environment. Sometimes, you can get lost in the weeds of definitions and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Agency, as used in RPGs almost always is about the degree to which the GM may aid or hinder the player's ability to make changes in the game world as a result of actions taken by their characters. At the very most basic level it is the players ability to control the choices and actions of their own characters. If you don't have that, you effectively have zero agency in the game world at all. You're just a spectator watching someone else act out the scene for you.

Past that, we get into degrees of agency, and what is acceptable. And in my opinion this has less to do with any sort of absolute determination like "can I achieve the desired outcome?". That's not a useful metric, because not all desired outcomes are equally realistic or achievable. "I wish to become ruler of the universe" may be a desired outcome, but it's not terribly realistic, and no GM would be accused of "curtailing player agency" by failing to grant that outcome to every player who requested it. Well, not by anyone behaving in a reasonable manner anyway.

To me, agency is the following: The degree to which PC choices and actions produce results in the game setting which are consistent with the existing game setting rules and standards as compared with similar action/outcome sets when taken by other characters (both PC and NPC) within the same game setting.

In other words: How much is the GM putting their thumb on the scale in specific response to PC choices and actions? To me, both are equal violations of the principle of agency: "I will ensure this fails because you are a PC", and "I will ensure this succeeds because you are a PC".


I think many people make the mistake of thinking that agency is only about "getting what I want", and the more you get what you want, the more agency you have. But IMO, that's not really the case. If something works, despite the fact that it shouldn't have based on the rules and standards of the setting, is just as much a violation as if something doesn't work, despite the fact that it should have based on those same rules and standards. Both are the GM manipulating things, rather than allowing the players to actually play their characters in the game world. And yes. I get that some might think "how is it decreasing agency to allow PCs to be more successful than they should be?". Well, is it agency if you didn't actually do it? If the only reason you can flap your arms and fly is because some external benevolent deity is levitating you, and it has nothing at all to do with your own actual abilities, is that actually agency? I would say that it is not.

Similarly, a "gimme GM" is not actually increasing player agency. Sure, the players are getting everything they want. But it's hollow. They didn't get it because they made choices and took actions that got those things. They'd have gotten them no matter what choices and actions they took. Which effectively makes their actual choices and actions meaningless in the game. Thus... zero agency.

That may be a bit different than how most people use the term, but that's how I view things. Agency is more about "expected relationship between action and outcome" than about "what do I get?".

[NichG]

I think this discussion is veering off into tangents about broad definitions of the world "agency", and kinda missing how the word is typically applied in a RPG environment. Sometimes, you can get lost in the weeds of definitions and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Agency, as used in RPGs almost always is about the degree to which the GM may aid or hinder the player's ability to make changes in the game world as a result of actions taken by their characters. At the very most basic level it is the players ability to control the choices and actions of their own characters. If you don't have that, you effectively have zero agency in the game world at all. You're just a spectator watching someone else act out the scene for you.

Past that, we get into degrees of agency, and what is acceptable. And in my opinion this has less to do with any sort of absolute determination like "can I achieve the desired outcome?". That's not a useful metric, because not all desired outcomes are equally realistic or achievable. "I wish to become ruler of the universe" may be a desired outcome, but it's not terribly realistic, and no GM would be accused of "curtailing player agency" by failing to grant that outcome to every player who requested it. Well, not by anyone behaving in a reasonable manner anyway.

To me, agency is the following: The degree to which PC choices and actions produce results in the game setting which are consistent with the existing game setting rules and standards as compared with similar action/outcome sets when taken by other characters (both PC and NPC) within the same game setting.

In other words: How much is the GM putting their thumb on the scale in specific response to PC choices and actions? To me, both are equal violations of the principle of agency: "I will ensure this fails because you are a PC", and "I will ensure this succeeds because you are a PC".


This is why I'm pushing against that definition of agency, because it really makes things about 'what things must the GM not do?' versus 'what are some things the GM could do, that would help people make a greater connection to the game?' If you think in terms of norms, expectations, etc, then all that lets you talk about is the errors. 'Violations', 'curtailing', 'what is acceptable', etc. But I think that's a bad way to think, its inherently a defensive position where you're looking to excuse things you're doing as part of your job to people who might criticize it. Its an easy stance to fall into on a message board like this, because its basically the first thing that's going to happen if you say you did anything. But ultimately I think its unhelpful.

It would be better, IMO, to say 'what are some neat things I can add to a game, and how can I know which ones are likely to work better?'. Rather than seeking justification for the game you were going to run anyhow, the focus is more on having more tools to run the game maybe you wish you could. So like, instead of looking at a situation where a player strongly asks to achieve something unreasonable, look at the situation where you have a player who is playing somewhat passively and reactively. Maybe you don't directly know what it is they want at all, what sort of things can you add to your game that will give you a higher chance of catching their attention, getting them excited and participating actively, and caring about the outcomes of the campaign?

Thinking about agency - I would claim specifically thinking about it in terms of informed decision points which allow different goals to be expressed in the resulting trajectory the campaign takes - can help analyze what might be missing, and picking between different elements you could add to the game to help engage that player.

In specific cases where something flubbed - maybe you had an important decision point but no one cared - then understanding the importance of the 'informed' part could help you diagnose that issue and improve the impact the next time there's a big decision to make. Or maybe there are big decisions with their consequences quite telegraphed, but there's an obvious best decision that everyone would want to take; okay, so now you need to figure out what sorts of decision points your players might actually disagree on the best path for. Maybe you have an issue where people aren't personally invested in decisions because everything is done by committee - well, the analysis in this framework will tell you that when everyone collectively makes a decision its going to be harder for each person to 'see themselves' in the resulting chain of events. There's less possibility to look back and say 'I did that' vs 'we did that'. If you want to use the math, there's less entropy in the distribution of group consensus goals than individual goals and that means less total information gain is possible.

This sort of framing, not in terms of justifying your GM-ing but in terms of giving tools to achieve goals as a GM, makes the stuff about magic marts or gimme GM-ing basically irrelevant. Because its not saying 'here, in this particular case, everything but this is a GM sin'. It's saying 'hey, here's how to troubleshoot players feeling disconnected from your game'.

[KorvinStarmast]

The trick is that you can't generally control outcome, though you should be able to influence it. Not perfectly, and in some cases that might be thwarted, but you should have influence, and you should be able to see that. Hence my question about agency or control. There is some overlap, yes.

[Quertus]

@NichG - Where to start?

For the Cunning Strategist, it's not goalpost moving, it's not missing the point, it's... a really odd miscommunication? So, for our "spherical cows in a frictionless vacuum", let's assume in a conversation about Agency that there is no "noise", and all... Agents(?) successfully achieved all Goals that were valid / possible in the scenario. Does that... no, that doesn't work with what I said, either. Sigh. I see that, juxtaposed with the "child romance" example, one might assume that "Cunning Strategist" was a joke, but I actually meant it seriously, as in "someone who achieves their goals through unconventional and unpredictable means" (obviously that's not a definition of that term, simply an explanation of what I meant to imply in that context, rather than the opposite of a "cunning" strategist, whose actions are unpredictable because they're (unsuccessful and) dumb).

Anyway, that aside, what are our knowns and unknowns in this... example? conversation? theory?... you are describing? My limited experience in this field involves the company starting with only data, attempting to locate patterns, attempting to hypothesize names (ie, "goals") for the buckets of patterns that were created, manipulating the environment (in this case, the code) to attempt to facilitate these hypothetical goals (or to facilitate the company's goals, given said hypothetical customer goals), and observing the results. In other words, the worst, dumbest blind Business Analyst through Data Analysis I can imagine. Is my roundabout way of saying, warning: I'm a bad audience, because my experiences have left me biased against this field.

ANYway, what I was asking was, with what you were describing, what were the inputs, and what were the outputs? Are you walking in with a finite set of modal goals, and trying to parse the data for patterns that allow you to sort users into modal buckets? Because it sounded to me like one of the outputs you described was "these are the decisions that matter for differentiating between goals", but I was uncertain what you were claiming were the required inputs in order to achieve that output.

You know, I think I break character more when talking with you than with anyone else. :smallbiggrin:

What makes this particularly complex is that, with sufficient X (am I committing the Fallacy of Four Parts or otherwise obfuscating differentiatable details if I call X "Agency"?) there are multiple paths to goals; someone with goal A may usually take action A*, and someone with goal B may usually take goal B*, but someone with goal B could take action A* when taking a different path to B. Or someone with the goal not!A could take action A* simply to obfuscate their motives if their goal was "not to be detected" (someone with an unpopular goal, a spy, someone trying not to show favoritism, or my favorite half-remembered example where a girl points out to a (depressed?) woman that her love interest talks to everyone but her -> he's in love with her too and trying to hide it. And, yes, there is so much data in each choice (I'm reminded of the 12 spheres puzzle), compounded by the fact that "becoming king" could be a goal for one person / character, but a side-effect for another's choices.

So, yeah, with all that said, I'm struggling to ascertain just what modern data theory can tell us in this setup. But I do like the way you framed it in terms of Expression - any elaboration along those lines would also be welcome.

[NichG]

@NichG - Where to start?

For the Cunning Strategist, it's not goalpost moving, it's not missing the point, it's... a really odd miscommunication? So, for our "spherical cows in a frictionless vacuum", let's assume in a conversation about Agency that there is no "noise", and all... Agents(?) successfully achieved all Goals that were valid / possible in the scenario. Does that... no, that doesn't work with what I said, either. Sigh. I see that, juxtaposed with the "child romance" example, one might assume that "Cunning Strategist" was a joke, but I actually meant it seriously, as in "someone who achieves their goals through unconventional and unpredictable means" (obviously that's not a definition of that term, simply an explanation of what I meant to imply in that context, rather than the opposite of a "cunning" strategist, whose actions are unpredictable because they're (unsuccessful and) dumb).

Anyway, that aside, what are our knowns and unknowns in this... example? conversation? theory?... you are describing? My limited experience in this field involves the company starting with only data, attempting to locate patterns, attempting to hypothesize names (ie, "goals") for the buckets of patterns that were created, manipulating the environment (in this case, the code) to attempt to facilitate these hypothetical goals (or to facilitate the company's goals, given said hypothetical customer goals), and observing the results. In other words, the worst, dumbest blind Business Analyst through Data Analysis I can imagine. Is my roundabout way of saying, warning: I'm a bad audience, because my experiences have left me biased against this field.

ANYway, what I was asking was, with what you were describing, what were the inputs, and what were the outputs? Are you walking in with a finite set of modal goals, and trying to parse the data for patterns that allow you to sort users into modal buckets? Because it sounded to me like one of the outputs you described was "these are the decisions that matter for differentiating between goals", but I was uncertain what you were claiming were the required inputs in order to achieve that output.

You know, I think I break character more when talking with you than with anyone else. :smallbiggrin:

What makes this particularly complex is that, with sufficient X (am I committing the Fallacy of Four Parts or otherwise obfuscating differentiatable details if I call X "Agency"?) there are multiple paths to goals; someone with goal A may usually take action A*, and someone with goal B may usually take goal B*, but someone with goal B could take action A* when taking a different path to B. Or someone with the goal not!A could take action A* simply to obfuscate their motives if their goal was "not to be detected" (someone with an unpopular goal, a spy, someone trying not to show favoritism, or my favorite half-remembered example where a girl points out to a (depressed?) woman that her love interest talks to everyone but her -> he's in love with her too and trying to hide it. And, yes, there is so much data in each choice (I'm reminded of the 12 spheres puzzle), compounded by the fact that "becoming king" could be a goal for one person / character, but a side-effect for another's choices.

So, yeah, with all that said, I'm struggling to ascertain just what modern data theory can tell us in this setup. But I do like the way you framed it in terms of Expression - any elaboration along those lines would also be welcome.

The 'spherical cow' bit isn't the absence of noise, but rather the presence of omniscience. For the formal definitions the mathematical framework doesn't assume a limited viewer within the world observing the agent, it takes a god's eye view in which basically know and tabulate everything. Every possible trajectory of every possible universe in which every possible action and every possible outcome of all sources of noise are taken. So for the math, there's no such thing as a divide between conventional and unconventional. If the strategist's actions were weird but increased the chance of them achieving state A* by 5%, then that's exactly the same as someone who took boring, common sense actions and also increased the chance of achieving state A* by 5%.

That's kind of the point of the math, to give us a way to remove our own subjective preconceptions. Some of the applications for this kind of framework are like, lets say we encounter Star Trek style alien life like sentient solar flares or mycorhyzhal crystals growing in the crust of a plant or entities that exist by manipulating quantum randomness or something - we want a mathematical framework that, at least asymptotically given sufficient observations and information, would tell us 'yeah, that vibrating rock over there is an agent, and its trying to create aesthetically pleasant triangles in the shadows of trees that will grow here in 1000 years by vibrating in such a way to encourage or discourage plant growth around it by manipulating where the roots go'. Or like, take some really huge Conway's Game of Life run on a 10^12 by 10^12 grid and highlight all of the 'agents' without a human having to look over everything and make the judgment by hand (which is likely to miss stuff anyhow, because of preconceptions).

The cost of that kind of generality is that you have to know everything that could be.

But, if you want to use this for practical (but still quantitative, not just conceptually inspirational) purposes, you do what you always do with these uncomputable mathematical frameworks - you approximate them. In which case, they become computable but sometimes wrong. In practice, this thing is built out of various kinds of mutual information, and you can estimate or at least bound mutual information pretty well with neural networks (when you train a network to output probabilities the difference in the training loss between start and end is a lower bound on the mutual information between input and output). In which case, yeah, an 'unconventional' strategy may land in a generalization gap of one of the networks and get missed. But then that's the fault of the approximation method rather than a fundamental issue, and it can be detected after the fact (hey, the network thinks this guy shouldn't be reaching A*, but he keeps reaching A*!) and even includes some of the seeds of its own repair (okay, lets train the network on this guy's runs, then in the future the network will be able to anticipate this kind of strategy).

Goals too can be quite general in this kind of framework - the most general case is that the space of goals is the space of all possible reward functions over states rather than lists of things a reasonable person might want to achieve. You can impose a prior or crunch this down - the cost of doing so is you might miss something, the benefit being that you turn the intractable computation a little more tractable. Maybe even introduce some interpretability!

So like, if you wanted to use the whole framework quantitatively and in practice, an example might be something like iteratively improving the design of a game like Minecraft by collecting lots of beta-tester playthroughs, finding the particular choices that have high mutual information with what the beta-tester eventually did, then tweaking the design of things to make those choices exist more evenly within the course of play, or hit a certain pattern of expanding opportunities you want as a designer, or maybe it points you to 'obligate' subsequences in a crafting system that aren't particularly interesting (lots of Minecraft mods suffer from this, with long crafting sequences that have no internal branch points - general resource A -> intermediate B -> intermediate C -> final product D, but B and C only ever make D).

[Mordar]

I think we all have said, in some form or fashion, that "agency" or "impact on the events of the game" or whichever phrase we prefer, is one quality that can influence the "goodness" of the game. NichG suggests it is a multiplier, I think it is a mid-impact slider, others may find it lower or higher on the spectrum than either of us. Some players might even find it a complete non-issue.

I think a number of other factors make games meaningful, and probably only half of them are related to the actual game component. If we stick to just things in the game (so not related to the social dynamics, etc) I think compelling questions, compelling settings, compelling ancillary characters, probably in that order, are terribly important. Then, depending on those elements, my ability to shake the pillars of heaven can be considered...a game wherein I cannot effect broad change isn't de facto a bad game for me, just like a game where I can reshape the entirety of the known world is not necessarily a good game.

I believe in the social contract of RPGs, the shared experience, and the commitment of time and effort to one another. Trust matters, but I am willing to actively choose to accept boundaries for a specific game until such time as the game convinces me it was a bad idea.

I expect my player skill, character skill (inclusive of all elements...levels, feats, whatever) and circumstance to influence my likelihood of success in actions, both narrow/immediate (like climbing a wall), broad/intermediate (like infiltrating a mob), or expansive/extended (like becoming the Archmage of the Order of Flightless Birds). I expect that GMs will not adjudicate actions based on their wanting to "beat" the PCs. I accept that Quantum Ogres can regularly improve games.

Finally, I think there is a risk people misconstrue failure with lack of agency. If the choices I make don't have the outcome I want that doesn't mean that I didn't influence that outcome. If I made a character build that excels in ActionA (so I have a +10 modifier), I make equipment and deployment decisions to improve my chances in ActionA (giving another +5 modifier), I might still fail at ActionA especially in an isolated instance...because I rolled a "2", because it is the hardest ActionA instance I have ever faced, or because something was actively working against my ActionA. But I had a helluva lot better chance that Quertus because that Mage can't ActionA to save his bacon. I influenced the chances of achieving the outcome, but still failed. Same thing applies to a broader goal, but it is less easily seen, because I am going to ActionA successfully often enough to recognize my influence on the outcome, but that whole achieving Archmage of the Order of Flightless Birds things can only be addressed once.

tl;dr: Want to make a game more meaningful to me as a player? Give me a compelling setting with interesting questions and some good characters. As a player I want my GM to give me a great framework and I'll fill details.

- M

[Quertus]

So like, if you wanted to use the whole framework quantitatively and in practice, an example might be something like iteratively improving the design of a game like Minecraft by collecting lots of beta-tester playthroughs, finding the particular choices that have high mutual information with what the beta-tester eventually did, then tweaking the design of things to make those choices exist more evenly within the course of play, or hit a certain pattern of expanding opportunities you want as a designer, or maybe it points you to 'obligate' subsequences in a crafting system that aren't particularly interesting (lots of Minecraft mods suffer from this, with long crafting sequences that have no internal branch points - general resource A -> intermediate B -> intermediate C -> final product D, but B and C only ever make D).

I'm just gonna poke at this one piece. So, it sounds to me like the A->B->C->D chain was supposed to represent no significant Agency, but I have a question: What if A, B, C, and D are ends in and of themselves, not just means? Even if that's the only possible build structure (or the only build choices ever made), I feel there's Agency in choosing to use B, vs crafting it into C. Like if Mithral Ore can be smelted into Mithral Bars, which are turned into Mithral Rings, which you can used to craft Mithral Chain... and people can place Mithral Ore blocks to build stuff, and stack Mithral bars to make pretty displays, and wear Mithral Rings as jewelry (OK, Minecraft doesn't really support this) in addition to making Mithral Chain, and people do all of these, that sounds like a choice. Or are you saying that those would be represented differently, as [A, A->B, A->B->C, A->B->C->D], rather than all lumped together as A->B->C->D?


If we stick to just things in the game (so not related to the social dynamics, etc) I think compelling questions, compelling settings, compelling ancillary characters, probably in that order, are terribly important. Then, depending on those elements, my ability to shake the pillars of heaven can be considered...a game wherein I cannot effect broad change isn't de facto a bad game for me, just like a game where I can reshape the entirety of the known world is not necessarily a good game.

I think I have to agree with you. The only point of contention, the only potential difference in our preferences might be related to just how much Agency is inherent in the concept of having "compelling questions", and maybe whether those compelling questions can be of the form, "here is the situation, what do you do?" rather than more "traditional question form" (like, "what is one's moral obligation upon seeing a wounded person along the side of a road?" or "what are the criteria for Personhood?"). And maybe just a hair of balancing the number of yes/no binary questions vs open-ended questions.


I accept that Quantum Ogres can regularly improve games.

Rather than me give a lengthy spiel, let me start with, what do you mean by this / why do you believe this?


Finally, I think there is a risk people misconstrue failure with lack of agency. If the choices I make don't have the outcome I want that doesn't mean that I didn't influence that outcome. If I made a character build that excels in ActionA (so I have a +10 modifier), I make equipment and deployment decisions to improve my chances in ActionA (giving another +5 modifier), I might still fail at ActionA especially in an isolated instance...because I rolled a "2", because it is the hardest ActionA instance I have ever faced, or because something was actively working against my ActionA. But I had a helluva lot better chance that Quertus because that Mage can't ActionA to save his bacon. I influenced the chances of achieving the outcome, but still failed. Same thing applies to a broader goal, but it is less easily seen, because I am going to ActionA successfully often enough to recognize my influence on the outcome, but that whole achieving Archmage of the Order of Flightless Birds things can only be addressed once.

Hahaha, I almost missed this bit, because I figured I knew where you were going. I guess... hmmm... I prefer that Expression be dominant whenever possible in such a scenario, in a "Kiss the Girls" way, such that you'd get the opportunity to succeed at ActionA (your "hardest instance I have ever faced" and "often enough") to demonstrate that facet of the character before having the chance at failing ActionA. And it's great Expression when you can also succeed in comparison to the Expression of someone (like a signature academia mage) who just can't even ActionA. :smallamused:


tl;dr: Want to make a game more meaningful to me as a player? Give me a compelling setting with interesting questions and some good characters. As a player I want my GM to give me a great framework and I'll fill details.

- M

I always felt the question of Agency was often curtailed when, rather than let you "fill details", the GM rejected anything but what they wanted in those blanks.

[NichG]

I'm just gonna poke at this one piece. So, it sounds to me like the A->B->C->D chain was supposed to represent no significant Agency, but I have a question: What if A, B, C, and D are ends in and of themselves, not just means? Even if that's the only possible build structure (or the only build choices ever made), I feel there's Agency in choosing to use B, vs crafting it into C. Like if Mithral Ore can be smelted into Mithral Bars, which are turned into Mithral Rings, which you can used to craft Mithral Chain... and people can place Mithral Ore blocks to build stuff, and stack Mithral bars to make pretty displays, and wear Mithral Rings as jewelry (OK, Minecraft doesn't really support this) in addition to making Mithral Chain, and people do all of these, that sounds like a choice. Or are you saying that those would be represented differently, as [A, A->B, A->B->C, A->B->C->D], rather than all lumped together as A->B->C->D?

If they're ends in themselves that's one thing, but in the case of the actual examples I'm thinking of (from mods like Immersive Engineering and the like) there are lots of these things that are just inventory entities that you can't even place in the world. So like, once you've made a 'bucket of creosote' or 'a pile of iron dust', it doesn't actually do anything until you do two specific following steps. You have to wash the iron dust to get refined iron dust, then melt the refined iron dust into iron nuggets, then smelt the iron nuggets into iron bars. There's no branch points and the intermediates don't show up in any other crafting recipes and can't be placed in the world, so you've basically said 'my goal is to have iron bars' and the mod just expands that production pathway into extra steps. That first choice to make the iron dust is the only agentic choice in that process (because otherwise maybe you could have placed the iron ore as a decoration, or smelted it directly, or something like that).

There are agentic choices enabled by the existence of that process, namely, do you build all of those machines to get 3 iron bars from 1 ore, or do you just use the base game smelter to get 1 for 1? But that choice happens once, whereas this production pathway you're doing over and over (though to be fair, the kinds of mods that have these things are intended to all be automated).

So this way you could see that 'ah, the choice to make iron dust tells me about the player and their context, but the choice to wash the iron dust doesn't actually provide me any additional information. Maybe I can add some other recipe that uses the iron dust to go some other direction, like alloy it with coal dust to make steel?'

Actually now that I think about it, at least one of this family of mods does let you diverge iron dust into a recipe for steel, so huzzah for that! There are a lot of these kinds of mods and honestly they all blend together for me by now (last time I played modded Minecraft, there were like three separate 'copper ore' entities that you had to get a separate mod to make them interchangeable...).

[gbaji]

This is why I'm pushing against that definition of agency, because it really makes things about 'what things must the GM not do?' versus 'what are some things the GM could do, that would help people make a greater connection to the game?' If you think in terms of norms, expectations, etc, then all that lets you talk about is the errors. 'Violations', 'curtailing', 'what is acceptable', etc. But I think that's a bad way to think, its inherently a defensive position where you're looking to excuse things you're doing as part of your job to people who might criticize it. Its an easy stance to fall into on a message board like this, because its basically the first thing that's going to happen if you say you did anything. But ultimately I think its unhelpful.

I don't think that's necessariy about the definition of agency though. It's about the fact that agency is not the sole determinant of "meaningfulness", which was the original point of this thread.

It does seem that what you are talking about now is how the GM can inject that meaningfulness into the game. And IMO, that has very little to do with player agency, and a whole lot to do with the GM being creative and placing interesting things to do, places to go, people to interact with, evil schemes to overcome, objectives to strive for, etc into the game, and then presenting these things to those players in a way which is both engaging and enjoyable for all involved.

But yeah. Agency is an entire different kettle of fish. I suppose it does intersect at the point of the GM, in the pursuit of said meaningfulness in the game, potentially restricting/curtailing player agency. If the GM decides "it would be really fun if .... <some sequence of events occur>", and the GM falls into the trap of trying to force that "interesting sequence" to happen, even if the players are trying to go in a different direction, or generate their own alternative sequence of events, this can result in a problem in the game. So I suppose one could say that the trick for the GM is how to put that meaningfulness into the game, without it becoming the GM writing a script and then the players just playing their parts in that "meaningful story".


It would be better, IMO, to say 'what are some neat things I can add to a game, and how can I know which ones are likely to work better?'. Rather than seeking justification for the game you were going to run anyhow, the focus is more on having more tools to run the game maybe you wish you could. So like, instead of looking at a situation where a player strongly asks to achieve something unreasonable, look at the situation where you have a player who is playing somewhat passively and reactively. Maybe you don't directly know what it is they want at all, what sort of things can you add to your game that will give you a higher chance of catching their attention, getting them excited and participating actively, and caring about the outcomes of the campaign?

Absolutely. And I also think, following on to what I wrote above, that there is no single perfect answer for this. As you point out, some players are very passive and are waiting for the GM to give them things to do. Others are very active and will find things to do. The GM needs to recognize each type of player and respond accordingly. I also tend to think that the passive player may be the hardest to engage while not curtailing "actual player agency", and honestly probably the hardest to even detect as well. When a player is very passive, you don't always know what they are trying to do themselves, and it can be very easy to, in the pursuit of providing them motivation and "meaningfulness", not even realize that you may be scripting things for them a bit. I suppose one suggestion is to talk to the player more directly and try to get an idea of what sorts of things they want to do or achieve in the game.

Proactive players are, as one might expect, the exact opposite. They are the most likely to push for things that are actually unreasonable/unrealistic and thus may generate the most claims of their agency being curtailed (more likely to push against the boundaries). However, they're also the most likely to generate idea that assist the GM in "creating meaningfulness" in the game. So usually a pretty decent tradeoff. It also takes a bit of balance to manage this (just a different kind of balance).

Again though, I really do think that the starting point is for the GM to first establish a set of standards and "norms" for how the game setting works. This gives the GM tools to determine when the baseline is being pushed too far, both in their own actions and in those of the players. If you don't have this in your setting, the you wont know if whatever "new and intersting thing" you are doing is actually impacting agency along the way. Again, this of course assumes that the objective here is to figure out how to add that meaningfullness to the game while also enabling maximum possible agency for the players. Obviously, if for some reason you actually want to run a game that is more in one direction or the other, then there are different measurements to use.

I still think it's useful to have that starting point though. Once you have that, you can measure everything you and your players do in your game against it.

[Mordar]

Rather than me give a lengthy spiel, let me start with, what do you mean by this / why do you believe this?

[Using the idea of a planned encounter (an ogre attack) that the GM deploys in a location other than where they originally planned...or that they had not fixed to a location = Quantum Ogre]

I am at the game to participate in the traditional game, and I want to give my character a chance to interact with the world. I want to interact with the encounters that my GM created to be part of an entertaining and enjoyable game. If the reason we did not interact with that encounter was simply because we chose to go to the Village of Hamletsville instead of the Hamlet Villville, and there is no compelling reason the Ogre could only be on path to Villville, then I have missed out on a fun thing.

That being said, I do not view it the same way if we are intentionally going to the Village of Hamletsville because we want to avoid the rampaging Hamlet Villville Ogre bandit that we heard about in town...that usually (not always) will be an irritation. Unless, of course, the Quantum Ogre had a specific reason to be on the lookout for our party and had reason to know where we were going...and it darn well better be made clear in the encounter that this is the case.

In short: The GM that I am choosing to spend time playing this game with has chosen to spend time crafting an encounter, and barring any compelling reason to not have the encounter, I want to have the encounter and be entertained.

Note: Encounter can be non-combat, can be discovery, can be a bijillion things.


Hahaha, I almost missed this bit, because I figured I knew where you were going. I guess... hmmm... I prefer that Expression be dominant whenever possible in such a scenario, in a "Kiss the Girls" way, such that you'd get the opportunity to succeed at ActionA (your "hardest instance I have ever faced" and "often enough") to demonstrate that facet of the character before having the chance at failing ActionA. And it's great Expression when you can also succeed in comparison to the Expression of someone (like a signature academia mage) who just can't even ActionA. :smallamused:

Word.

Strange example, not sure what it means exactly, but know we hated it, and it seems to relate:

Playing 7th Sea, but would apply to many of the non-D&D games out there. Player designed a character to be really good at a few academic exploration kinds of skills that require active learning (don't remember exactly which, but it was like Cartography, History, stuff like that). Another character was a street-rat who "grew up near the University" and was built as a combat character but with like 5 dots in Wits and a GM-fiat allowance to roll on skills that require ranks "...because zero ranks is ranks". So the girl playing the academic had the chance to shine and rolled adequately on this important thing to know to continue the adventure...and the munchkin promptly declared they were rolling as well and got a significantly better result (dice luck plus some broken concept advantage). That was the point at which the girl playing the academic utterly disengaged from the game. Combination of niche-stepping and inadvertent negation of the entire character concept. The combination of decisions by a well-intentioned GM and another player zeroed out the meaningfulness of the game.

- M

[NichG]

I don't think that's necessariy about the definition of agency though. It's about the fact that agency is not the sole determinant of "meaningfulness", which was the original point of this thread.

It does seem that what you are talking about now is how the GM can inject that meaningfulness into the game. And IMO, that has very little to do with player agency, and a whole lot to do with the GM being creative and placing interesting things to do, places to go, people to interact with, evil schemes to overcome, objectives to strive for, etc into the game, and then presenting these things to those players in a way which is both engaging and enjoyable for all involved.

But yeah. Agency is an entire different kettle of fish. I suppose it does intersect at the point of the GM, in the pursuit of said meaningfulness in the game, potentially restricting/curtailing player agency. If the GM decides "it would be really fun if .... <some sequence of events occur>", and the GM falls into the trap of trying to force that "interesting sequence" to happen, even if the players are trying to go in a different direction, or generate their own alternative sequence of events, this can result in a problem in the game. So I suppose one could say that the trick for the GM is how to put that meaningfulness into the game, without it becoming the GM writing a script and then the players just playing their parts in that "meaningful story".


The original post of this thread resonated with me because I think while what you're saying is sort of a classic view, those things actually don't matter to me *except* in how they give me things I can explore via acting through them. And it explains campaigns I've found evocative or boring a lot better than e.g. interesting setting or creative GM. Its not that GM creativity doesn't factor in, but only the parts that make it through the filter of agency actually matter to me. I've had very creative GMs whose creativity is primarily 'on their side of the table', whether that made sense or not in the norms of the setting they presented, those campaigns didn't catch me nearly as much as the campaigns where the GM e.g. gave the players opportunities to play with things you normally wouldn't get to play with.

So this is why I say that agency (or informed delta, in the specific context of this thread) may best be seen as a multiplier. If you have a boring world and a lot of agency, maybe you're multiplying a lot of agency with zero things worth actually caring about - if you had goals, you could pursue them, but the world doesn't support interesting goals. On the other hand, if you have a really creative, evocative, etc, etc world and no agency, you're also multiplying by zero - the world might be interesting but its not actually sharing that interesting-ness with you in ways that can matter to you. There could be all sorts of goals worth pursuing but since you have no power to pursue them, they don't matter.

But the 'interestingness' of the world independent of the players relationship to the world itself is not, to me, indicative of what I will find to be a good generator of meaning. For me, justification within the context of the world, established norms, etc basically don't matter that much in of themselves. If a GM presents a very interesting world with lots of well-established justifications of why I can't do any of the interesting things in it, that doesn't make it suddenly like 'oh okay, I'm fine with having no agency' - it just means that entire framework contains very little to interest me, so from experience I should probably leave the game.

Its always harder to talk about my own GM-ing here because we can't usually see our own blinders, but of course I wouldn't be pushing this viewpoint if it were inconsistent with my own experiences as GM. I've run a lot of very experimental campaigns, and the things that tend to fail are predominantly when the pathway to connecting with the oddities or interesting or novel aspects isn't well enough marked. Thats why my current philosophy of system design and GM-ing is that rules are tools to give players OOC information to let them know that things are possible and reliable, which their preconceptions would tell them not to expect to work. You don't write a rule because 'we need rules to know how the game is played', you write a rule because its an efficient way to let a player know 'if you do X, I promise that Y will happen in such and such a way' because that makes 'X' available as an action with a predictable consequence, which in turn allows a possibility to turn into actual agency, which in turn means that players have that additional avenue to connect to things.