The Delta Theory of Meaningfulness

[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.

[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... )

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