Quote from: Sacrosanct;568012Suck it DM, that's what the player wants.

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Quote from: Sacrosanct;568012Well, if the player decides what is and isn't in the game world, what's to stop them from saying they find a plasma rifle?  Suck it DM, that's what the player wants.

The rules of the game should outline what is "genre appropriate" to create on the spot. Storywankers lurves their balance after all and its a good bet that anything that would let a player completely rule a scene would be nerfed in playtest for the benefit of the group. (This includes annoying shit like a player using his/her fucking brain from time to time )

I don't know, I guess it screams entitlement to me.  I mean, yeah there are things the player should expect without the DM making a ruling, like:

"What do you mean the ocean suddenly doesn't have water?"

But the "I expect a shotgun to be under the bar, so there better be one or my immersion is broken."?  That's entitlement.  Maybe there's a good reason why there wouldn't be a gun that only the DM knows about?  Players help create the story, they don't dictate the story.  If you want to be in charge, next time you DM.  The DM does a whole hell of a lot more work running a game than a player does playing it, so if you take away all control, why would anyone bother being a DM?  Giving the players whatever they want whenever they want it, especially if it creates complications for the campaign, hardly sounds like fun.  If the player request is reasonable, then there shouldn't be a reason do deny it.  But if a player gets upset because their immersion is broken because they expected a shotgun to be there when in the game world there's a reason that one shouldn't be there, that's a player problem, IMO.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;568022Giving the players whatever they want whenever they want it, especially if it creates complications for the campaign, hardly sounds like fun.

What the hell?  You define fun as something other then always having your desired result occur and being the central focus of everything?  What do you think you are, an adult?

N00b

Quote from: Sacrosanct;568022I don't know, I guess it screams entitlement to me.  I mean, yeah there are things the player should expect without the DM making a ruling, like:

"What do you mean the ocean suddenly doesn't have water?"

But the "I expect a shotgun to be under the bar, so there better be one or my immersion is broken."?  That's entitlement.  Maybe there's a good reason why there wouldn't be a gun that only the DM knows about?  Players help create the story, they don't dictate the story.  If you want to be in charge, next time you DM.  The DM does a whole hell of a lot more work running a game than a player does playing it, so if you take away all control, why would anyone bother being a DM?  Giving the players whatever they want whenever they want it, especially if it creates complications for the campaign, hardly sounds like fun.  If the player request is reasonable, then there shouldn't be a reason do deny it.  But if a player gets upset because their immersion is broken because they expected a shotgun to be there when in the game world there's a reason that one shouldn't be there, that's a player problem, IMO.

Yeah, I had to have this stuff explained to me with big diagrams and a whiteboard last year when I first started getting back into RPGs, so messed up is it. This is why I've been babbling on about surprise being a key factor, although CR put it a lot more eloquently.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;568001What happens when you expect a shotgun to be under the bar, and your buddy who is playing character B expects a baseball bat?  Whose immersion gets broken in that scenario?

Neither, each finds the weapon they expect.

Quote from: gleichman;568064Neither, each finds the weapon they expect.

Yeah...so there is no 'in setting' logic in that scenario.  

See, I described it much earlier...but in reality, or When you are trying to model reality, you jump behind the bar hoping to find something...and you look to see what is there.  We  don't know.  We receive reality through our senses.
The gaming equiv is jumping behind the bar and asking what you see, maybe even leading asking if there is a weapon.  At this point, a good GM figures the approximate chance of there being something useful, and rolls on it...again modeling the chances that they feel a weapon like object is there.  That is gaming from the perspective of the role.

And btw...Not judging, but this seems true...

In the beer thread, one player described the different, more reckless and more cinematic play style when the pcs know they have outs. Versus games that model more lethality.

Quote from: Benoist;568008I see GDQ as a campaign, not a single adventure.

Oh, I couldn't agree less with that, Ben.

Quote from: Benoist;568008GDQ is more akin to an adventure path than anything else.

And adventure paths are really the epitome of linear adventures.

Quote from: Benoist;568008Now if I'm following your argument, are you saying that you see GDQ as a linear adventure done right? That would mean that, since the adventures themselves are linked by somewhat rigid clues or leads in, you mean that if each "scene" (i.e. module) is like a mini-sandbox, but the outcome is consistent (reaching the end of the giant compound to find the Chief's treasure, the map and chain that will transport you to the Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl), then it's linear.

Is that what you mean?

Yep, that sounds right.

Ok so. My issue here has to do with scale. The freedom you might feel from playing each of the different modules (scenes) of GDQ does not necessarily translate at the level of an adventure module following that same structure.

If you have each scene or situation as set pieces where you can do whatever you want but the links or junctions between the scenes are rigid, how is that not a railroad?

Quote from: Benoist;568093If you have each scene or situation as set pieces where you can do whatever you want but the links or junctions between the scenes are rigid, how is that not a railroad?

With respect to GDQ, the junctions aren't rigid; adventurers may or may not find the teleportation links, and the adventures account for this. Where GDQ gets railroady is the initial set-up - do this thing or get shortened.

But I think we fundamentally disagree on the nature of GDQ; I see it as one big adventure, and, if I understand you correctly, you see it as a series of adventures held together by tracks.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;568121But I think we fundamentally disagree on the nature of GDQ; I see it as one big adventure, and, if I understand you correctly, you see it as a series of adventures held together by tracks.

If you want to see a series of adventures held together by tracks, take a look at A1-4, the Slaver series.  The transition from A3 to A4 pretty much requires that the bad guys capture the PCs by fiat, take all of their stuff, and toss them in a dungeon.

Parts of my D&D 3.5 campaign were inspired by the A series (as well as B2) and that was a part I wanted to include, so when I hit that point, I knew I'd need a way for it to make some sense in the setting because the original was just too heavy-handed to work with the group I was running.  The PCs had started doing divinations to get a sense of what they should do next, so I gave them a divination that they should try to sneak in but will be captured, but that would not mean failure and they should not despair.  When they were relieved of all of their stuff, a few of the players said, "We're despairing!" but there was a logical way for them to escape into a scenario similar to A4 (an NPC Wizard-Thief with Eschew Materials that had Gaseous Form memorized with the Still Spell feat, a possibility that the NPCs could logically overlook while binding and gagging her).  But even then, it was a mighty heavy set of tracks.

A lot of people already gave good answers to some of this...

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899Do you consider Sorcerer, Don't Rest Your Head, and Apocalypse World to be 'storygames'? If so, then those.

Don't know enough about any of those to know for sure.  

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899Who says you get to choose to throw a pitch? Perhaps your arm cramps up.

Who says you get to choose to shoot an arrow? Perhaps the shaft breaks.

The snappy answer is, "That's what fumble tables are for."

The more serious answer is that there are millions of things that could happen at any moment, including the planet being sterilized by an x-ray blast from space or pulverized by a rogue asteroid or planet hurling through space.  Accounting for every possibility is impossible, so most games largely ignore highly unlikely possibilities and people don't notice them missing because they rarely happen, anyway.  The vast majority of the times when a person attempts to throw a ball or fire an arrow, that is, in fact, what happens.  Not all pitches are strikes nor all arrows bulls-eyes, though.  And that's why baseball cards have statistics about how many strikes, balls, and hits a pitcher throws but not how often their arms cramp up.   What matters are cases where there is a lot of randomness or uncertainty in what will happen, not where there is little randomness or a great deal of certainty.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899Who says you get to choose to ask a woman out? Perhaps you lack the courage.

Are you normally so internally conflicted yourself such that you are unable to decide what you do?

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899Who says you get to choose to do a gymnastics routine? Perhaps you're delayed at the airport too long.

Why wouldn't I be role-playing through actually getting to the competition in the first place?  Is this an extension of your bar example?  Your gymnast PC gets up in the morning at home and you jump right to telling the GM that he's flying to the Olympics and is about to perform a gymnastics routine for the Gold Medal without the GM asking you to role-play through anything in between to establish, for example, that your character actually gets there?

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899Every action we take is an intent. Every result we assume is an expectation. This is how people operate. It is the mental model we use, and people differ in the specifics. Understanding this makes you a master manager. Dismissing it leaves you only able to deal with people using the same model.

This is simply post-modernist nonsense that muddles statistical possibilities with likely possibilities.  

No project manager is going to put "Planet gets pulverized by an asteroid" or "Employee breaks their leg trying to walk to a meeting" in the risks section of their project plan.  Are those things possible?  Sure.  But so rare that they won't be considered except in the most generic way (e.g., the possibility that a critical employee will become unable to perform their job functions temporarily or permanently).  

And any manager that has to account for their normal employees failing at their intent to do things like speaking in their native language, answering a phone, walking down the hallway, or doing the routine tasks of their job needs to find new employees because normally people routinely succeed at much of what they do.  

In fact, games that try to model things like the risk of crashing a plane during a routine landing invariably wind up overestimating the possibility that there is a disconnect between the pilot's attempt to land and actually landing to a level worthy of the old Murphy's Rules column.  

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899I do EXACTLY the same thing. For example, when one of my characters is in a bar fight in a western town, I see the tables and chairs, I smell the beer, I hear the sound of broken glass, I'm THERE. Whatever makes sense to visualize.

But what happens when I go behind the bar and grab the shotgun? Wait, WHAT shotgun? The shotgun which I ASSUME WILL BE PRESENT in a western bar where fights tend to break out. And if a shotgun ISN'T present, it needlessly disrupts my immersion, just as it would if the GM suddenly corrected me and said the bar's walls were painted hot pink.

Actually, you don't do the same thing because you aren't imagining yourself as your character being THERE.  

Are you seriously telling me that if you got caught in a nasty bar fight and decided to leap the bar because you assumed there would be a shotgun back there that you'd be unable to accept the possibility that you fail to successfully leap the bar or don't find a shotgun back there?  Would you ask God for a timeout and argue that He's deprotagonizing you?  Would you lose your immersion in reality and go insane?  

If I were in a bar fight, I might think that hopping a bar to look for a shotgun is a good idea because I assume one is back there, but I would never assume that my belief was reality until I got behind the bar and either found or did not find a shotgun back there.  Ever hear of the expression "look before you leap"?  Do you understand what it means?  If you want to talk about critical managerial skills, I'd say that that one belongs right up near the top.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899For immersion to work, you have to allow players to make assumptions based on their character's PoV which are valid in the shared fiction. But most GMs I've played with haven't gotten the hang of this yet. Nor have most systems.

The problem isn't that the players and GM make assumptions about the setting.  The problem is that you assume the player has no obligation to ask the GM if their assumptions are correct and that the GM has no authority to tell the player that their assumptions are incorrect.  

You want: "I jump over the bar and grab the shotgun," without the GM asking for a roll to jump the bar or the GM telling you that there is no shotgun there.

I'm quite happy with, "I jump over the bar and look for a shotgun or other weapon." and I would also have no problem with a GM telling me to make a roll to see if my character actually jumps the bar cleanly, the GM telling me that there is no shotgun there, or the GM asking me to make a Perception roll to see if my character spots a shotgun that may or may not be there.  And that far more closely matches the provisional nature of making choices like that than the having my assumptions automatically be true.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899DOES NOT COMPUTE >_<

Much of the game was role-playing that simply didn't engage the D&D mechanics at all and the D&D mechanics were nice enough to simply stay out of the way of the role-playing, which many storygame systems (and traditional systems that attempt to model the psyche of the character in detail with multiple ratings or advantages and disadvantages) don't stay out of the way of.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899No it doesn't.

Yeah, it does, because I've seen it in action.  One of the other features that seems common when people who talk about storygames is that the mechanics usually seem to be designed with one-on-one conflicts in mind or some sort of one person takes control ideal such that when asked about how the system handles complex interactions between multiple PCs and NPCs all simultaneously acting, the response often seems to be that it doesn't work well, if at all.  In fact, trying to get interactions and timing right is why some games have things like attacks of opportunity and zones of control, precisely to prevent "I run through their line and attack the magic user in the back" when it's clear that, in real life, the other characters would have plenty of time to move in to stop that from happening.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899What about describing your own 'crits' like in RuneQuest 6?

I have no desire to do that.  If I had to do that, I'd probably create a table and roll it for myself.  I hate making decisions like that, even when I GM, because I simply have no preference for any particular option and it's effectively impossible to make decisions without any preference for any of the choices.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899Not if they're excited and engaged with the situation. The trick is getting them there, but it's not exactly difficult most of the time.

Even when they are engaged, there are plenty of players who have no interest in engaging the system.  Their emphasis is on the role-playing, not the game.  

Quote from: chaosvoyager;567899Prove it

Read more non-fiction.  Life doesn't work like most books or movies do.  

During the early 1990s, after the Japanese bubble burst, Japanese dramas went through a very dark period and there were Japanese dramas where nice guys killed themselves, major characters died in random car accidents, point-of-view characters died before the end of the story, and the story ended with characters leading pretty awful lives with unhappy endings.  In many ways, those were amazing to watch because you couldn't take story logic for granted.  My wife and I would cringe when an upset character would run toward a busy street because it was entirely possible they'd run out in front of a car and be mauled or die.  And it really hammered home to me how artificial most fiction is in restricting what's possible.  

(See, in particular, Kono Yo no Hate [この世の果て] and Sugao no Mama de [素顏のままで] but Asunaro Hakusho [あすなろ白書], which is easier to find, was from that period and has a lot of those traits.  The anime Maison Ikkoku was made earlier but has a bit of that as well, especially if you really understand what you are looking at.)

Quote from: Black Vulmea;568121But I think we fundamentally disagree on the nature of GDQ; I see it as one big adventure, and, if I understand you correctly, you see it as a series of adventures held together by tracks.

Well what I'm sayin is that the scale is different. When we are talking about a campaign, you can have some big chunks of adventuring that feel free and open (= each module) held together by some narrow links (= junction points between the modules), but if you take that at the scale of an adventure, the big chunks become mere scenes and if no matter what you do they result in the same outcome (= link from one scene to the next), it's essentially a railroad, because you do not have the same feeling of freedom at all you do with a campaign like GDQ and big adventuring/sandbox chunks in between.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;568001Wait a minute.  Is someone implying that unless the players dictate the scenario/surroundings/NPCs, it breaks immersion?

I thought it was the DM who decided those things, not the players.

What happens when you expect a shotgun to be under the bar, and your buddy who is playing character B expects a baseball bat?  Whose immersion gets broken in that scenario?

A lot of STGs don't even have GMs. The distinguishing characteristic of an STG are narrative control mechanics: Mechanics which determine which player gets to decide questions like these.

Quote from: LordVreeg;568004We talked about it until I asked her what kind of beer it was.   She said she could make that up as well.  I answered that first, " do you see where this is going?  Once you stop receiving and start projecting, it changes the way we naturally perceive the world.   And secondly....how do you know that beer and wine production has not been seriously thought out and that you are actually fucking with the setting?". And then I proceeded to link the beer and wine page of celtricia to the argument...

I see the point you're making and largely agree with it. However, this can get really fuzzy at the edges when you look at it too closely. There is a natural process of closure which is not only intrinsic to a verbal description but necessary for verbal descriptions to be meaningful.

For example, if I'm playing Call of Cthulhu and the GM says, "You enter a Qwik-E-Mart." That statement is going to automatically cause me to go through a process of closure in which I imagine the interior of a Qwik-E-Mart. If I then say, "I grab a Snickers bar." it would be misleading to say that I'm exerting narrative control in asserting the presence of the Snickers bar. Rather, I am still reacting to the mental picture created by the GM's statement.

Now, it is true that the GM did not say anything about this particular Qwik-E-Mart having Snickers for sale. And it's also true that the image I've created in my own head based on the GM's description isn't an exact match for the image he has; nor is it a match for what the other players around the table have in their heads.

But in practice, when I say "I grab a Snickers", the same process of closure will occur with the other players: They, including the GM, will visualize the location of the Snickers bar in the Qwik-E-Marts they're imagining in their heads.

This only becomes problematic if our visions of the Qwik-E-Mart end up mutually contradicting each other. (As in your example of someone reaching for a specific brand of beer that doesn't exist in your setting.) That's the point at which you discover who actually controls the game world: In an RPG it's the GM; in an STG there'll be a narrative control mechanic to determine it.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;568121But I think we fundamentally disagree on the nature of GDQ; I see it as one big adventure...

You would be wrong.

That's not how it was conceived. That was not how it was written. That was not how it was published.

One might try to argue that this was the way it was collected. But that's like claiming that a short story collection is the same thing as a novel.

Quote from: LordVreeg;568004Been out of touch for a day. See what happens?

We call it the ' beer test' in the cbg'.  One of the story gamers postulated if having a player just grab a beer that was on a bar was taking narrative control, and I answered that of course it was.  
We talked about it until I asked her what kind of beer it was.   She said she could make that up as well.  I answered that first, " do you see where this is going?  Once you stop receiving and start projecting, it changes the way we naturally perceive the world.   And secondly....how do you know that beer and wine production has not been seriously thought out and that you are actually fucking with the setting?". And then I proceeded to link the beer and wine page of celtricia to the argument...

"Are there any barmaids there?  I wanna DO them!"