Quote from: Elliot Wilen;545184Abstraction and scale aren't quite the same thing. That might be a nitpick,

It is, abstraction starts with the selection of scale (unless we're talking about D&D where it starts with HPs... really strange case D&D).

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;545184As I wrote above, I find that guesstimating distances is acceptable because the precision implied by a feet-and-seconds model is (a) spurious and (b) at a level which is often unknowable or unactionable to the participants

It's find if the abstraction is contained in the rules, not find with the guesstimating is contained in the GM.

Beyond that, I've already answered this point.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;545184First of all,  if the GM's judgment doesn't have a systematic bias,

IME it typically does. Normally in favor the the PCs and at an unconscious level.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;545184and I'm assuming that the GM doesn't have an agenda.

He always has a agenda, typically to have a fun game the pleases his players although there are worse cases.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;545184Fair enough...but after skimming the 5/24 playtest rules, I think the guidelines on advantage/disadvantage are really pretty clear.

I can't really comment. My only reason for being in the thread was to explain what one type of 'Mother My I' comment means, and where I see acceptance that style of gaming coming from.

I leave it to other if it applies to D&DNext combat or not. I have no interest in that game.

Quote from: Benoist;545175My contention is that it's not because you think this is the optimal way to represent elements in the game that it ought to be for everyone else, or that all other alternate ways are inferior, only result in a complete chaos, a total lack of meaningful information and approximations, and automatically leads to the "20 questions" thing. That's what I am calling bullshit on.

My contention is that it's more efficient to accurately convey the information visually than verbally (I think your diagram also illustrates this) such that getting an accurate and rich understanding of a complex situation will be easier and more reliable with a diagram than with a verbal description, (B) diagrams with some sort of grid or hex convey scale and proportion better than a diagram without a grid or hex, (C) unless the player has a comprehensive understanding of the situation and what their character is and isn't capable of doing it will inevitably require a lot of questions to the GM to determine what their character can or can't do if they want to assess a variety of options (in effect, "20 Questions" or "Mother May I"), and (D) the primary way of escaping the problem of conveying details between player and GM seems to be to not have them, to make them mechanically irrelevant, or for the choices and decisions of the players to be very simple.

Quote from: Benoist;545175What I have personally found is that putting a mat with a grid specifically in front of people changes the dynamic of the game for some players (not all). The more you pile on these sorts of abstractions, the easier it is to game the rules instead of playing the game, by which I mean, actually imagining what is going on as though you were there and reacting to the situations accordingly.

And that is very different problem than the grid or miniatures, themselves, slowing down the game or replacing imagination.  It also raises the question of why players would behave that way if it didn't give them something that they wanted and are, in effect, being denied by the elimination of the tools.

One of my pet peeves with this hobby is how strongly games and GMs work to restrict the environment and options of the players to limit what they can do.  Adventures happen in dungeons that have restricted pathways through them and which have to be entered and exited in a specific way.  Characters are restricted to classes, professions, or clans that fill certain roles.  Characters are often assumed to be traveling through places they've never been before so what they know is restricted to what they learn in the course of the game and they can't use information that they might already know.  Combat effectively boils down to a handful of optimal choices that the players choose again and again.  All of that, to me, is what truly stifles the choices that players make.

Quote from: Benoist;545175This is what some people here are talking about when they say the grid ruins their immersion. The game basically becomes the application of the rules on a board, the grid itself, and the effect this minigame has in the actual game world becomes an afterthought, a consequence of that minigame.

I can see that and I've even been guilty of it, myself, but the problem isn't the tools but how players use them.  But the alternative has negative side effects, too.  Consider the pejorative "Mother May I" as the flip side of the pejorative "minigame" and claims of it destroying immersion.  Where you see players dropping immersion to game the combat to their advantage, I've seen GMs game judgement calls over things like range and movement to manipulate the outcome of the combat.  When the player asks, "Can I charge through that gap in the middle of the guards and attack the evil priestess?" and the GM has to subjectively decide whether the character can reach the NPC and attack in a single turn and subjectively decide whether it draws attacks from the guards who might close to stop it, the temptation for the GM to make those decisions based on how they want the combat to go rather than simply the situation at hand is strong.

Quote from: Benoist;545175I have found that when players forget about the grid and when you actually tell them out loud that what they see on the diorama or white board is an approximation and not what is actually happening in the game world, and that it'd be cool if they thought about the game world first, the figs on the board second, it actually "clicks" with them fairly easily.

And you need to physically get rid of the map board and markers to do that?

Quote from: Benoist;545175Having played AD&D with miniatures since the days of my 3.5 campaigns, I have observed an increase in the actual immersion of the players, because they just don't have to think in terms of rules to instead visualize the situation, whether it uses actual visuals on the game table or not, and act as though they were there. I cut the intermediary of the grid, with or without miniatures, and went back straight to the game world as a reference, asking players to use their imagination instead. And it works.

I don't doubt that it works, but how complex are their choices?  What kinds of tactical choices to the players typically make in combat and how much information do they need to make those choices?

Quote from: Benoist;545175Only Gleichman is claiming that people don't want to admit that. Of course you are losing absolute accuracy when you are not using precise means of simulation like a grid and miniatures. But there is a world of excluded middle between an abstraction that is usable to communicate directly between players and share an imagined space at the game table, and the total lack of meaningful choices and communication breakdown you guys keep saying this is about. I honestly -honestly now- cannot remember the last time I played a game in the last what, 25+ years, playing at dozens of different tables with literally hundreds of different people over the years, where this kind of complete communication breakdown ever occurred the way you are portraying it right now.

I've seen quite a bit of it, even with people I've played with for decades.  Heck, one of the two retcons that I remember was the result of a verbal-only encounter where differences between how the GM understood the situation and how I understood it led to my character's death.  After realizing the misunderstanding, we replayed the scene.  See also the Usenet message by Mary Kuhner that I referenced in this reply in the other thread for another form of the problem, in that example between a husband and wife who played one-on-one games extensively together.

Quote from: Benoist;545175I appreciate that you feel like you need the grid and tokens yourself, but that doesn't make it something critical for anyone to enjoy an RPG effectively and consider they have meaningful choices in front of them as their characters in their mind's eye.

What are the meaningful tactical choices that the players in your room-with-a-pit example could make without asking for more detail from the GM (i.e., "20 Questions") about the situation and the rules implications of the choices?  And how many of the questions, including a few that you gave in your example, would they not have to ask with a scale drawing on a grid or hex map where they could see the terrain and character positions and calculate distance and range on their own?  I'm not seeing that point as a matter of mere opinion or taste.

Quote from: Benoist;545175To me, it sounds like you are making the argument that choices and actual tactics are contained within the parameters of the rules themselves, exclusively. I think any wargamer would disagree with that.

No.  I'm making the claim that understanding options and the implications of choices come from understanding the situation and the rules that will be used to resolve those choices.  If I know how far my character can move in a turn, I can understand which movements options are possible and what their implications might be.  If I know the range of my character's weapons and whether or not I can shoot through other characters obstructing my target, I can understand what my target options are and how those choices might turn out.  If can't assess a choice unless I know it's possible and what it might mean and if I can't know that without querying the GM, the choices are either "Mother May I"/"20 Questions" to assess what my choices are or keeping those choices really simple based on the limited facts that I do know.

Quote from: Benoist;545175I like to play wargames and role playing games. I consider myself to be interested in actual tactics, that is, actually applying tactics at the level of the game world, trapping enemies in a room with flaming oil, using high ground, ordering people around, making a plan to attack the keep, and so on.

Great, but what about the players who don't know that high ground offers than an advantage or doesn't think flaming oil is an option to hold an enemy at bay, either because they assume the oil fire will be small and ineffective or they assume the enemy willing and able to jump through it?  Those are exactly the sorts of problems I've seen with assumption clash, even when dealing with casual players who don't care much about the rules.  

In fact, I've seen the perfect example of this in action.  In college, I played a D&D game run by a guy in the SCA (now an anthropology professor) who grafted his own realistic combat system onto D&D that took things like higher ground and charges into account.  Only the GM had the rules.  The players simply described what their characters were doing and the GM would apply the modifiers and so on.  When the players don't have access to the rules and what will and won't work, they wind up making bad choices without knowing they are making bad choices, don't make good choices because they don't know they are good choices, and decisions can get pretty arbitrary.  The players can't make good choices based on information that they don't have.

Quote from: Benoist;545175I hate it when the rules become a minigame and that the "tactics" become whether I get an opportunity attack or not, whether taking a 5 foot step will reduce the cover of the opponent I'm trying to shoot at this round, and so on. These aren't the tactical situations I'm interested in.

Then don't use rules that take that level of detail into account.  I've used maps and markers with pretty vanilla Fudge.  That's not a problem with the map grid and markers but with the rules being used with them.

Quote from: Benoist;545175I'm interested in being immersed in the world, not having to deal with another layer of rules acting as a buffer between me and the game world. I don't want to have to translate whirlwind attacks and cleaves into actual moves in the game world in my head. I want the opposite: to describe those moves as though they happened live and then have the rules being tools used to adjudicate them in terms of successes and failures, die rolls and the like.

And if the rules don't explicitly have things like Whirlwind Attacks and Cleaves, how often do you see players use them, what mechanical effect do they have on the game, and who gets to decide that?  How does a GM decide how a Whirlwind Attack or Cleave works without rules defining that and how do those rulings remain consistent?

Quote from: Benoist;545175YMMV, but that quote is actually true for some people, many of which might enjoy playing role playing games I'm sure.

I'm sure it's true for some people and I even gave you an example where it was true for me.  But it doesn't change the fact that if it were really true for a significant number of people that radio dramas wouldn't be a largely dead art form which suggests that quote is of limited value.  Nobody is tuning in their radio at 8PM to listen to the latest episode of Gray's Anatomy or Once Upon A Time.  Why do you think that is?

Quote from: Benoist;545175There are different levels of accuracy and consistency that can be played in any number of ways in a role playing game. Some ways some people will enjoy, others some people won't, and vice versa. My point really is that your way is not the only possible way that works.

I'm not claiming it is.  What I'm saying is that it's a choice with consequences and things are lost when accuracy and consistency are sacrificed and when it comes to immersion in character and setting, there seem to be plenty of people who find immersion difficult to maintain without detail and consistency.

Can't answer your post right now because I can't break down posts effectively on my phone, but I'll get back to it, John.

There is no style or issue of "mother-may-I" it's a phrase which has effectively pushed buttons. Masterful troll.

I think this thread has gone way into tangency, so I'll be responding to a post from earlier that wasn't:

Quote from: DestroyYouAlot;544550It's a completely false dichotomy - the idea that, unless you have a hard and fast rule defining a thing, that a competent and reasonable DM can't make a ruling without it being a "gimme".  Usually with the implication that the players are buying the DM pizza, for whatever reason.  

Note that "magic item wish lists" are for some reason exempt from this complaint.  :idunno:

First of all: people who have been consistent about not liking the "Mother-May-I" bullshit have been consistent about hating 4e's Item Wishlists as well. I, for example, am on record as having said that system was the worst system of handing out magic items ever, and that you'd be way better off either handing out items in a player controlled marketplace or outright randomly. Putting the GM in the position where there is the expectation that they will give out the frost bastard sword the ranger "needs" but no actual mechanism for ensuring that will happen is the worst thing in the world. It puts the arrow the wrong way: where not finding a specific item in a random displacer beast's lair causes the player to resent the DM.

But this 5e thing where the player isn't allowed to know what their character can do (both because the rules explaining what skills do are in the DM guidelines and also because those rules are almost entirely "the DM makes something up on the fly"), is just as bullshit. It is the worst possible method of engaging players. If you want players to engage with the story, they should be able to tell you what their characters can do. It is not an exaggeration to say that Mike Mearls gets butthurt when players attempt to do things based on their understanding of how the universe works and what their character can do.

Quote from: Mike MearlsThe section that covers common tasks follows the same basic format as the skill section, and it presents these as guidelines for DMs. These are not canonical, player-controlled rules, but a guide to resolving common tasks to help inform a DM's decision-making process.

This is bullshit. You know what absolutely fucking better be a "player controlled rule"? Things your character does! It's a cooperative storytelling game, and in order to cooperate or add anything, each player has to be in control of their own additions to the story.

It's not just that Mike Mearls is so afraid of player empowerment that he removed all player agency from "common tasks", putting all of the burden on the DM. It's that in doing so he has made the game take an ass long time to resolve anything. Every time you attempt any task, the first thing you do is ask the DM to write some damn rules for it off the top of his head, and then hope that the rules written in this manner will give you the slightest hope in Hell of actually doing whatever it is you wanted done. That is molasses slow in addition to being fundamentally insulting.

The DM already controls the difficulty of the world. The player needs to control the abilities of their character. How the fuck are they supposed to write their section of the story if they aren't allowed to know what their character can do?

But while I know that there are a lot of 4e fans out there who seem to have only just now noticed that "Mother-May-I" crap is crap, and were willing to completely overlook those elements in 4e (notably in the skill challenge and equipment sections), there are still a lot of 3e fans out there who have consistently hated on this stupid concept from the beginning. Honestly, I think it comes from the fact that most 4e fans pretty much did not use the skill challenges and made pacts with their DMs about how and what items were to be found before the game even started.

-Frank

Quote from: gleichman;545201It is, abstraction starts with the selection of scale (unless we're talking about D&D where it starts with HPs... really strange case.

To digress a bit, I don't think that is quite right. At least feet and seconds aren't directly comparable to other dimensions which one might abstract. For example, I've often pointed to what might be called abstraction of the limits of conscious control. In wargames this is comparable to abstraction of "soft factors", such as the decisions of subordinates, into a die roll. RPG combat could be simulated at the angstrom and millisecond scale, but one would still need to decide whether to abstract the reaction time, coordination, and awareness of the character, or to let the player declare they'll swing their sword at precisely such-and-such time and location.

That's an exaggeration of course but I do think there can be value (vividness, realism) in simulating fairly detailed effects even though I'd advocate abstracting the process that leads to them.

To clear something up, though, when I originally said a GM can be consistent, I was thinking more about "campaign level" or "adventure continuity level" issues.

But the issue of control-scale vs. physical scale is relevant to combat, and the scale/degree of abstraction can be chosen somewhat independently for each. I suppose my point is that control-scale has implications for the need for objective, transparent precision in physical scale even if some elements are modeled at a level beyond that precision.

Maybe I can put that in plain English tomorrow.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;545307To digress a bit, I don't think that is quite right. At least feet and seconds aren't directly comparable to other dimensions which one might abstract.

Clearly I think they are more related than you do.

In general there are many areas for abstraction and depending upon the specific game we're talking about- they may or may not have considered the other areas when they were determined. Different designers may start their design process at different points for their own reasons (I always start with scale myself).

So the question I have for you is, where are you trying to go with this? I'm bit lost I'm afraid.

From now on, I will force my players to call me, "Mother". Then I'll make them ask for permission to go to the bathroom.

Brian, it is clear for me that you have not thought very much about the unknowns and complexity levels of combat modeling.

As for spatial cognition...well well, lemme just say this: gridded maps keep everything on a discretized 2d level.
By doing that, they prevent the collapse into a 1D binary level (in range not; back-front).

But many many people can have and will be succesful in using non-discretized i. e. continous representations of spatial situations. To be doing this consistently to the satisfaction of everyone involved, there needs to be a constant feedback loop and information redundancy. Talking, implicit assumptions being reality checked implicitly too, gestures, drawings on a split second turnaround time!

A constant back and forth of information in verbal and graphical ways, this is what roleplaying is its strongest at. And thus it can provide what wargames and computer games cannot: continous movement and full freedom of action.

I see no reason to do away with rpgs strengths.

If you are such a "migraine-personality" that you are unable to cope with non-discretized versions of the complex world, may I suggest you get into ASL? Never ever will anybody be asking anyones mother. All possible rules questions are resolved already, even the most arcane. Everything is in neat hexes, with line of sight even being modelled in a teeny mode of non-discretized arrangement, still uses only the center dots, mind you.

If you had ever encountered a truly complete rulesset, you would know how foolish you sound when comparing GM-driven games with anything like them.

Quote from: Settembrini;545327A constant back and forth of information in verbal and graphical ways, this is what roleplaying is its strongest at. And thus it can provide what wargames and computer games cannot: continous movement and full freedom of action.

I see no reason to do away with rpgs strengths.

Very well put - spot on. The whole point of an RPG is that player characters should be able to attempt anything, and to allow such freedom a GM is needed  as an arbiter of success or failure. The more rules or legislation constrain this freedom of choice, the less like an rpg the game becomes.

Quote from: Settembrini;545327If you are such a "migraine-personality" that you are unable to cope with non-discretized versions of the complex world, may I suggest you get into ASL?

Ah, from reasonable observation to BS false dichotomy in a heartbeat.

4e is shit.  People who whine about "Mother May I" are fags.  4e is shit.

Quote from: jeff37923;544509Am I right? I could be wrong, but it looks like the latest version of "we must disempower the evil DM because the DM could stop my fun". Is this really a problem in gaming?

When the term was first coined (years and years ago), it seemed to apply to behavior that was actually problematic.

Now it seems to be getting applied to any circumstance in which the DM is actually doing their job. Complete idiocy. It's people saying, "Compared to a video game, the great thing about an RPG is that you can do anything." And people replying, "Yeah, and that's a problem."

Quote from: B.T.;5453604e is shit.  People who whine about "Mother May I" are fags.  4e is shit.

Astute.

Quote from: John Morrow;545160What benefits does your approach offer that sketching out the room and putting some pawns on a BattleMat that's already on the table not offer?

I can't speak for Benoist, but in my experience there is generally a point where players stop interacting with the game world and start interacting with the limited representation of the game world presented on the tabletop.

This point can vary dramatically between players.

This is why I don't use products like Dwarven Forge unless they precisely match the game world: I find that, given that level of detail, virtually all players perceive the game world as being the model terrain regardless of what physical description may be given. (For similar reasons, I only use monster miniatures if they're a precise match for the monster I'm using. I've literally seen players who fought a vividly described hook horror remember the monster as being an ogre because that's the miniature that was used.)

With my regular 3.5 group I use a Chessex battlemap and draw room outlines using magic markers. That group has no problem continuing to interact with the game world in this situation: In other words, they don't mistake the map for the territory.

But I've played with other people for whom that isn't true: As soon as the grid lines are laid down, they're interacting entirely with the map. And anything that isn't on the map stops existing for them.

I've taken these same players, removed a layer of abstraction, and gotten them to start interacting with the world again.

Complicating this, of course, is that there are people who want to play on the map and don't give a damn about the territory. There was a 4E game I played where the DM was using preprinted battlemaps. At one point during the battle I wanted to circle around the bad guys and I asked, "What's off the map here?" And the response was, "There's nothing off the edge of the map. That's the edge of the map."

QuoteAnd at some point, if you look at Brian's old Elements of Tactics column on RPGnet, abstraction essentially eliminates meaningful choices for nearly all of those elements such that there are little or no real tactics involved in play.

I took a look at that essay and I'm not drawing the same conclusion you are. There's nothing about facing, ganging up, range, or terrain features that require non-verbal depiction in order to use them or take advantage of them.