[D&D] Persuasion in the Middle, or GM Fiat at the end?

[Moreno R.]

I owed a reply to Eero (here, and it was almost ready, when Ron closed the thread, so I am changing it to a stand-alone post in a new thread. [the title is only a pun and it should not be considered nothing more than that]

This post is a reply to Eero's posts in this thread. I am not addressing Callan's posts at this moment because they enlarge the subject too much. D&D and similar games (like Vampire, GURPS, Runequest, etc) have specific problems with the use of persuasion at the table (caused by the absence - by design - of common rules known by all the players and by raising a player above the rules, among other things) that other more modern and robust games don't have. So it's not a general issue.

First, I want to put a fence. In this side of the fence, talking with me, there are the people who understand that you can't have a conversation, or any form of communication, that is not biased by the way you talk, communicate, perceive and understand, and not influenced by previous bias.  On the other side of the fence are all the people that believe in the "theory of the holy GM screen", the people who show up every time in these discussions saying that any GM that act like a human being (regarding how communication works) is a "bad GM" and that a "good GM" (their, usually) is completely immune to these human biases and is a perfect and objective arbiter-god of his world. The fence is there because I find talking to these people at best useless and at worst exasperating, so I would ask them to stay away from this thread.

That could be seen as harsh, seeing that until now nobody here has acted like that (and specifically, not Eero) but I have seen really too many discussions about D&D turned into shit by an invasion of fanatic hymns to the Holy GM Screen, and this forum is public. Better safe than sorry.

What Eero did, instead, was a reduction of any form of social skill and nuances (from the use of specialized knowledge to bring into a decision to the choice about the point to argue, or - in the example from my reply - the choice to use a critic award instead of naked tits to convince your girlfriend to see a movie with you) to "kissing the GM's ass".
We already addressed this point in the old thread, but I am digging it out again because it shows a certain mind-set that come out in certain discussions about rpgs, often associated with the faith in a "real dungeon, real terrain, real movement rates", etc: that everything that is not measurable, numbered, ruled, everything "social" is "kissing the GM ass".
Why this happen? Well, I could project local observations into general rules here, but I think it has a lot to do with the way, in Old-school D&D (and similar games) [u[fictional positioning is the heart of play[/u]. You "win" not by using your meager resources (one spell/day, 2 hp, maybe a single healing potions, etc.) but by using using fictional positioning to avoid combat, to avoid risks, or, if and when you get to fight, to do that in a terrain of your choosing, in a situation that put you in advantage and minimize your risks.
But in D&D, how you get into the fictional positioning you want? Usually, by talking with the GM. Using very few rules, or no rules at all, but using the fictional actions of your character to get the GM to make rulings ("rulings, not rules", they even acknowledge that).
So, if "simply talking" is seen as "social", as "persuasion"...  this mean that D&D become a social game! (Argh! The horror! Social!) and communication is more important than the miniatures and the dice!
To avoid this, these groups usually use "social" only to things like "kissing the GM ass" (see, "social" is a bad world, associated with un-manly behavior. We don't want sissies and women in the nerd's basement, right?), and act and talk like the act of using words, arguments, social pressure, and other forms of communications to persuade the GM to make ruling in your favor...  is not social at all, but it's "objective description of the game world reality"
This is what I have seen in a lot of discussions (and actual plays) with people who would refuse the mere concept of role-playing games as having anything to do with "social things".  What interest me in this case, is that this reduction was made by Eero, that I KNOW has not these kind of phobias about seeing any rpg as a social activity. I think it show how this king of "faith" in the objective reality of the... imaginary space is so necessary to this kind of play, that even if you don't really believe it, you have to wear it as a kind of "protection vest" yo be able to enjoy this kind of play at all.

Probably Eero will not agree at all with the part above, so i would like to separate that (contentious) part with the following one, because I would like to address them separately. In the part above I have replied to the bias I have seen as evident in Eero's post, now I want to address instead his points. So I will draw a line...
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Communications is social. RPGs are played using a form of communications (usually a conversation, but it can be a series of letters instead, for example. No matter, its still a kind of conversation). This conversation is both the medium of play (the shared imagined space is a text, it's what was said and heard: it isn't what you imagine in your head, that is not shared with anyone until you turn it into words) and the instrument you use to change fictional things in the game. Credibility is your "resource" that allow you to move, change or create, but how you use credibility? using persuasion
The use of social skills to "persuade" the other players to "believe" in your input, in what you add to the SIS, is fundamental, to the very fabric of the fiction you create during the game.
So, "persuasion" is at the heart of every rpgs. But why I am talking about it specifically in talking about D&D?

As an example, here is a scene from a Trollbabe session: For a lot of reasons that don't matter for this example, a couple of trollbabes are attacked in a ruins in the arctic wastes by a huge sea-serpent. The first one fail too many rolls and I get to describe how the serpent incapacitate her. I describe how the serpent open his jaws and swallow her whole. The other trollbabe go to her rescue and with a good series of rolls she kills the serpent and cut open his belly with her sword, freeing her still-alive friend.
My description was credible because I had already described the Serpent as being really huge, and it had already swallowed whole some NPC at the beginning of the battle.  But I really had no resistance at all to this description, I had no need to really make an effort to "persuade" the players, because we were playing with common rules known by everybody, the players could act without any "mother-may-I" subroutine, and my description couldn't render their input into the game meaningless or laughable. Without any resistance a credible description "pass" without any problem. There is no tension at the table, there is no "buzzing", the usual noise of D&D players protesting every GM decision they don't like.

Same scene in D&D: the GM rolls damage, and says that the serpent swallow me whole. Now, I know that the serpent has not that ability in the Monster Manual (I am making the example using both times the GM imagination and creativity, not a fixed-effect roll). That description seriously damage my capacity to PLAY in the following rounds (in D&D you don't simply lose hp, you lose the capacity to participate in the game too) and put my character at risk, so, even if it's a credible description I fight it. How could the serpent swallow me whole without taking damage? I had already said that I was raising my lance against his mouth. Shouldn't he impale himself? And how can the pavement of the ruins support his weight? Shouldn't he crash into the cellar? And how the hell can a serpent big enough to swallow me whole get to pass through the door you described before? If he smashed the wall, shouldn't you roll for the damage he got? And how come I don't get a saving throw? I would have gotten a saving throw if a mage had sent me a fireball, how can I ba able to jump of the way from a fireball and not from a Serpent that is slower and is not a freaking big ball of fire?
And if at the end he swallow me... should I not be able to hit him without even rolling now, from the inside avoiding armor? What, you say that I don't have the space to move my spear? Oh, right, the spear, imagine how much damage the spear is doing in his insides... but no, i am using my dagger. I have in my booth. What? You say i didn't tell you that I had it? Ahw, don't be silly, I have described that dagger in my booth at least in five separate occasions before this, Must I tell you that I put it there every morning? See, I have it into my character sheet. No, it's not described as "in booth", but the sword is not described as "in the scabbard" either. Are we playing an adventure or we are counting beans?"

What it's happening here? Well, it's simple: I don't have any shared game procedure to react to a fictional decision from the GM that put me out of play. If we were playing Primetime Adventures, we would not lose all that time discussing it, there is a shared and known procedure to resolve the question: we go to the cards and resolve the conflict, and it's common procedure that the one who get narration rights get them as "rights". He has no holy mandate to be "fair", or to be "balanced" or to be the "objective arbiter of the world".

Not having ANY shared game procedures that allow me to react "in-game", my choices are (1) go eat a sandwich until the others finish the combat (a couple of hours, seeing the usual inefficiency of D&D combat system and all its wasted useless rolls), OR (2) STEP ON UP a fight in the real arena of the game: challenge directly the described fiction, finding holes, attacking its credibility, or getting in a better fictional position (from "helpless victim unable to act" to "the one who can hit the serpent from the inside"

These are the two usual choices, roughly along the axis of two kind of D&D play: (1) is more common in "GM create the story and you follow it like a sheep" play. The GM has decided that you are swallowed and you are, period. Trying to convince the GM is useless, he has already the end of the story in mind. And (2) is typical of step-on-up play, and it's practically the only arena, in this game where the rules describe combat like two people hitting each other at turns like in a Laurel & Hardy silent movie where you can step on up, show your resources, quick-thinking and imagination.

Eero describe two kind of "facts" that are considered "true" and are not subjected to this kind of social hammering:
1) Things already established in the fiction
2) Things already established in the GM preparation notes.
And I agree with him about this, but I don't give to these two things nowhere near the level of "presence" in the game that he talks about.

The first kind of "true facts" is not a problem at all for step-on-up kind of social bargaining I described above. Au contraire they are what render it possible!  If I had not some already-established facts to build my argumentations upon, I could not challenge the GM at All!  In my example I am using a lot of "true" facts already estabilishged: that my character has often hid a dagger in the booth in the past, that in similar case I was allowed to a saving throw to avoid a fireball, etc.
"More established facts" means MORE AMMUNITION FOR ME and more difficulties for the GM in this tug-of-war, so it's a rather common experience in all the groups I have seen play D&D that that kind of bargaining at the table increase with time, because the players have more and more material to use to persuade the GM.

The second kind of "true facts" is the kind that will betray the GM during the game. It's the no-win situation of intensive preparation time games. Let's see for example the situation I described with the zombies in the previous thread.
Imagine that you already fixed, during the time you dedicate to solitary preparation of the adventure (drawing the map of the dungeon, rolling hp for the monsters, creating or choosing the random encounter tables and populating the dungeon with local monsters, rolling or choosing treasures, etc.) that "the zombies can detect live people even in darkness"
So (1) you have spent time during the preparation to describe in detail the zombies powers and abilities. What happen during the game?
Two kind of things, usually:
1) We meet the zombies, your preparation is not wasted. I use my intelligence to step-on-up and find a way to survive. Your preparation time negated already that solution, my plan fail, my character died, I will never be sure that you really had determined that my plan would fail in advance and it's not a improvised decision at the moment. I will try to convince you in any case, but this not only breed suspects at the table, but turn the step-on-up arena from "fictional positioning" to "let's try to guess what the GM thought at home". The game reward less stepping on up and more the simple luck of using the "right" strategy and not the "wrong one", like drawing in a lottery.
2) We try to avoid the zombies. If we do that, you have wasted the time you used to detail them. You will be tempted to "cheat" to avoid wasting all that time for nothing. You are pushed toward the road to story-before.

So you are right in the middle between hammer and anvil: on one side you have the kind of D&D game where the GM details everything, losing really a lot of time, to have most of the fictional material "fixed" and "real" before playing, and this kind of game fatally turn more and more toward story-before because it's not humanly possible to do this kind of total preparation for every possible choice the PC could make. In other words, you turn away from step on up play.  On the other side, you have games where the GM don't "fix" too many thing and keep the preparation time at the minimum (as far as it's possible for a terrible preparation-heavvy game like D&D, where you have even to roll for the hp of every monster...) but at that point, everything is negoziated in the tug-of-war I described above.

So, at the end, in D&D you have a kind of step-on-up game based on persuading, like a lawyer, the GM to make rulings in your benefit, or you simply don't have step-on-up play: this is caused by a simple thing: the lack of any real shared game procedure for doing things.

The "poison" at the heart of D&D is this: there are really no rules. The very few ones are about very precise cases (somebody hitting you with a piece of metal basically) and, in old school play, if you use them you are dead.  So at his core D&D is FREEFORM. There is really no game procedure to do ANYTHING apart from "let's try to convince the GM to allow it".

So, you have a choice when you play that D&D: you can try to use the few rules to play a "step on up" game of finite resources and chances. And you will fail and your character will die, because, as every grognard could tell you, "you are playing very badly, you are roll-playing, when you should role-play". Or you can try to persuade the GM to let you win. If you are good, you will do it. If you do it badly, you incur in the risk of irritating the GM and having him make rulings against you, or even kill your character.

You only need to listen to old-time players talking about their "big moments" to realize which of these two kind of games they are talking about. I don't hear anyone being proud of having a character killed in the first manner.

Turning back from the general case to your specific case, Eero. You talk like most of what your players encounters in the dungeon is fixed, not negotiable or subject of persuasion social techniques.  But you have written in the storygame thread, about your preparation time: "Oh, it's not really that bad. Of course it depends on the skillz, but I'd say that a moderately experienced DM (even just a half dozen sessions under his belt) can run your basic dungeon after a half an hour of prep." 

Personally, I always used gaming modules to save the time and avoid having to draw maps, roll monsters and treasure, etc, and STILL I have never been able to lower the preparation time to a half an hour. I needed more than that even simply to READ the damn map and know what was where without having to stop the game and go read the module again.
Even at the end, when MY MONSTERS CEASED TO HAVE STAT, because in  full "illusionist mode" I made them fall whenever I wanted, or I improvised their powers at the moment, or even when I STOPPED CALCULATING THE XP (for six players it took more than half an hour by itself alone) I could not shrink the preparation time to that point.

Even playing almost totally without rules, using only illusionism, with NOTHING fixed during preparation... I still needed more than half an hour, just to get a sense of who was who and why they were there, or to simply CHOOSE THE MODULE AMONG THE ONES IN MY LIBRARY!

Now, maybe you are really so much faster than me in reading modules, rolling dice to build monsters, calculate xp, populate dungeon, writining lists of gems and coins and treasures, etc, but... how many more "true facts" can you establish in that time? Do you take every single monster and think "now... if Moreno run away  what they will do? If Moreno hid in the middle of corpses, what they will do?" BEFORE THE GAME, in that half an hour?

And if you don't, you say that you use "principle decision" about that. OK. So this means, in practice:
1) something happened, in the past events of play, that can used as a precedent (by me, to try to convince you)
2) there was no indication or precedent whatsoever, so you do a "principled" decision... without any principle to built on? Even if you use as principle "be just", what does it means in this case?

Doesn't maybe means "he did think of a good tactics, it would works" (I persuade you)
Or maybe "he should not get away so easily, he should roll" (I don't persuade you, so I am dead, because in old D&D, if you always roll no matter what you do, you are dead before reaching the next level)

Seeing that we have as working hypothesis that there was nothing in the established fiction to give any indication about that (or I would have used it to argue with you my case, using simply a different tactics if the zombie in a previous encounters showed that "detect life" sense)... upon what established fiction you can say that that decision based?
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Last, a note about perception.

I had never any problem in perceive the difference that a different capacity for persuasion made in playing D&D, simply because usually it was really, really evident every time. There is no need to search for some biases in my observations, when all you need to do is see how my character simply do better that the others in measurable things...

I have played this winter a 14-sessions game of Apocalypse World by hangout. I played a gunlugger. During the course of the game this character became a sort of invulnerable killing machine, with a body-count of maybe over a hundreds enemies...  and it was never wounded, Non even once. He did win every single fight, single-handely, and in the last session, when he did feel betrayed by the others, he attacked them and "killed" one (I used a partial success in a roll to make "myself" believe he was dead when he was in fact gravely wounded but still alive) and made the others flee, wounded. My character had not even a scratch. After that he did kill every single member of the gang of the "killed" character, destroyed his base, jumped on a car full or weapons, ammo and a full tank, and rode into the sunset with his woman.

All this was obtained using a lot of fictional positioning and persuasion, and IN THIS GAME it didn't cause attrition between me and the GM or the other players, because the game was not about "winning" and everybody got to play with clear procedures and without having to ask the GM for everything, but you really think that, if I noticed that my guy usually got things the way he wanted positioning himself before a battle... it was only my impression? A bias? Even if something like this happen every single game I play, in any group? (I am not always the one most persuasive obviously, but when it's somebody else... oh boy, it's even much more noticeable...)

I can believe that you don't notice this happening in your group, but there is a very simple explanation for that: you are roughly even in your social skill / capacity of persuasion, so it's not a factor you notice in the decision process. You have never had in the group somebody noticeable better that the others, or worse than the others, to show you the difference it make (or maybe you are the best one, and if we ask the others in your group they noticed very well the difference...)

[Callan S.]

I'm pretty sure Eero's perspective is that he is simply seeing objective evaluations, as much as if we'd already said 15 or higher is a pass, I roll a D20 and the top face is 18, we'd all say it's objective evaluation that I passed. He is just seeing more objective evaluations in stuff like the fictional notion of where a PC is standing and the fictional notion of whether a trap applies to them. I'm pretty sure he's going to say alot of what you describe isn't applicable to him, since he's dealing with the objective evaluations - and as much what you're talking about, Moreno, is something utterly different (the ass kissing stuff, where everyones given up on the objective and is just ass kissing). I'm guessing he'd say 'Would you call that dice roll ass kicking? If not, why would you call the fictional positioning I described as this...thing...you talk about? What I talk about is just as objective as the dice roll!'

The myriad social interactions will always seem something else, another topic entirely, than the objective evaluation Eero sees. In my estimate provinding more examples of social interactions will not progress the discussion - it'll just seem off topic for Eero. Just my estimate, might be wrong, but for what it's worth.

Moreno, it might be worth putting yourself in the other guys shoes and describing a sample of your own play first (probably best if it's actually D&D play) as if it were objective evaluations that determined all events.

Then describe the exact same play session a second time, with all the persuasion and social interactions that you estimate are the actual driving force of play.

It'll probably help give a middle ground to discussion, instead of seemingly talking about entirely different subjects than each other. And yeah, I know, it'll be teeth grinding to describe the session as if it ran on objective evaluation (and will beg a million questions), I do sympathize! :)

And along with it, Eero might equally in responce have a shot at describing some of his play in both ways as well, even as much as attempting to describe his play being based on social interaction and persuasion will be teeth grindingly counter intuitive to him as well? :)

[Eero Tuovinen]

I'm feeling a loss of motive force on this topic, to tell the truth - I understand that Ron doesn't particularly want us to keep digging into it, and starting new threads to technically accord with the last closure while continuing the same exact discussion seems pretty disrespectful. It'd be better if we took this to email or something, most likely, even if that loses any possibility of third-party perspective.

However, as a sort of summation, a few key points I take away from Moreno's post. Hopefully the following may provide some closure, and of course I'll be interested in seeing it if others took any summary points away from this. If you think that we still have more to say to each other, Moreno, by all means shoot me an email.

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First, it seems to me that Moreno's flagship thesis is revealed in elaboration as much less radical than I would have taken it from the first. (Callan, I understand, holds this more radical position.) At least I see Moreno taking great care to distinguish the entire range of social communication technique here, which I take to mean that he wants to be encompassing when he characterizes D&D as being about "persuasion". Fair enough.

For me calling it "persuasion" is, however, a pretty unnatural choice of words. Of course the game involves a lot of social skills, but the words I would use for those, and in fact routinely do, are as follows: leadership, initiative, boldness, clarity of expression, focused attention, clarity of imagination, knowledge of the subject matter. The players who lack in these social skills are, indeed, less effective towards the overall run of the game: they plan less, ask less clarifying questions, misunderstand key established facts, lack the knowledge to innovate new solutions, and ultimately are forced to rely on dice unadulterated by the sort of finesse better players bring to the table.

To me the above characterization of the social reality of D&D does not read as "play is about persuading the GM", it reads as "play is about team-work, planning and attention to the fiction". Specifically, persuading the GM about anything in particular only happens in the same sense that you might use about a judge: you're bringing up established facts and logic, and if those prove persuasive, then your case is strong. Few would say that law is about "persuading the judge", however, exactly for the same reason I find it a peculiar way to express the situation here.

If the type of "persuasion" you intended in characterizing the game was akin to what I describe above, then I don't know that I have anything particular to say about it, except that I don't really understand what beef you have about this nature of the game - apparently you think that because the GM cannot be 100% correct all the time, a game set up like this is bad in comparison to another game that does not rely on fictional positioning? That's the sense I get from your contrast with Dogs in the Vineyard, anyway - that it's superior because you don't need to reference the fiction to utilize the mechanics. Fair enough, although that quality would be pretty low on my own list of reasons for why DiV is a good game.

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Regarding your giant snake example and the contrast between Trollbabe and D&D, here's how I see the technical difference:

In Trollbabe the task of a player is to advocate for their character as a moral protagonist. The focus to this entails necessarily that the player is pretty open to external events: those events are not the player's true responsibility, and he needs them to play his character off them. As is typical of this type of game, it doesn't even matter procedurally or mechanically in Trollbabe whether your character gets swallowed by a giant snake (I like to call this a "formalist" relationship between the fiction and the mechanics: the system informs what you should narrate, but not the other way around), so it's no surprise that a player will rank the enjoyment of seamless fiction over arguing about his character's fate. After all, it's going to be even cooler when they triumph if they do it from the gut of the snake.

In D&D, on the other hand, whether you get swallowed or not is everything, because it directly and severely impacts the procedure of play. Tactical positioning matters in D&D, in other words. This obviously means that everybody focuses a lot on tactical positioning, and this causes a lot of discussion to occur. Seems pretty natural to me.

Now, you call the process of determining how to play a giant snake situation in D&D a persuasive one. However, I would not: we are not playing to persuade each other, that's conch-passing bullshit. You can't legitimize a procedural position in a living campaign (at least of the sort we play) by convincing another player against their own interests. For this reason the sort of massive list of counter-arguments you depict does not actually occur: we are not playing against each other, I am not trying to get your character killed, and you are not trying to get your character saved. Instead, what we are trying to do together is to figure out the fair and proper procedure to discover what happens next. Ultimately the GM might be forced to back down altogether: you can only swallow a character when the player finds it a legitimate suggestion, at our table.

Because our process of play is so different from how you depict it, the swallowing situation, while not entirely devoid of debate, does not descent into anything that I would characterize as unpleasant. For example, in the summer of 2011, while playing Wheel of Evil, a leading character in our adventuring party got swallowed by a giant carnivorous mushroom. It is to the credit of our group, and the player in question (in general one of the best D&D players I've met), that despite the massive psychological pressure (a beloved character in peril) we got through the event like gentlemen. The player requested clarification about the geometry of the situation (where the mushroom's mouth was and how it could reach him, and especially how ever did he end up upside down in its gullet - I wasn't entirely clear in my initial description of the event), but most of the details you mention were hashed out in full amity and agreement, thanks to the clear standards the campaign had for this sort of thing.

In all, I would say that while I agree with you that Trollbabe and D&D work very differently in regards to tactical positioning, I would not call the essence of D&D's system persuasion. Play does slow down when the stakes get higher, but that's because the GM is keen to not make errors in an important situation, the players are gauging the GM's judgements and their own actions more carefully, and everybody's racking their brains to make sure of the legitimacy of the proceedings. This is entirely natural, and only resembles persuading somebody in the same way legal proceedings do. Certainly players can avoid having their characters killed by being quick-witted and talking well, but the substance of that talk is not mere persuasion, it is the game itself, and full of tactics, psychology, strategy, logistics, history, fight choreography and everything else the game is about. The persuasive power lies in the truth of the content, and mostly not in the player who lays it out.

I find it instructive that you first characterize the procedure of play when the GM makes a complex call on an important matter, and then in the next paragraph state that this is happening because D&D lacks a shared game procedure for dealing with something like this. My interpretation, and forgive me if this is wrong, is that your background being in a different strain of D&D, you don't notice the very procedure you are talking about when you're describing it yourself. Questioning the GM's call is exactly the procedure you're looking for, that sort of auditing of his judgements ensures that his play is up to the standards. As long as you're questioning him in good faith and not just going through an aggravating laundry list of increasingly desperate rhetorical stratagems, it is the very core content of the game we are talking about: I play D&D exactly because I want to figure out the tactical limitations and repercussions of a giant snake swallowing a character with a spear, so it's somewhat peculiar to treat a vigorous and detailed discussion of the situation as a problem.

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I like your summation regarding the different kinds of established fictional content, but your conclusions are entirely alien. That is, we do exactly the sorts of things you discuss here, with the GM both determining facts on the fly and preparing them in advance, but the sort of consequences you describe do not materialize. In fact, I would like to say that you put much too much weight on whether a given GM call is predicated on prep or made up on the spot; in practical play a difference cannot usually be perceived.

Players do, in fact, often fail completely because they guessed wrong about the resources or the tactics of the enemy. I mean, this isn't something that happens once a month, it happens just about in every session of play. Sometimes characters die. I would like to suggest that if this is seen at all as problematic, then that's where our experiences and expectations differ: at our table it is not a problem that sometimes players fail. Even more, it's not even a problem that they fail without "being at fault". It seems that many D&D GMs subscribe to the idea that you shouldn't "kill characters" (as if the GM should be doing that anyway) unless they first make a mistake that justifies their death. Not so at our table, that sort of thinking is foolish and prone to corrupt play by putting excess responsibility on the GM.

A player can request the GM to show their work, explain how they come to particular judgements. This is not the problem you suggest: as long as the players have general trust in the GM as a faithful official of their joint agenda, they only rarely have reason to audit his work. Thus the GM can do things like surprise the players with zombies with lifesight, and the players will accept this because they trust that the GM made this determination out of the correct motivations. If I ever lost faith in the GM in this manner, I would request them to step aside, for it is impossible to play the game in the way we do unless you can believe that the GM does not have corrupt ulterior motivations.

This concept of trust is incidentally what makes it generally insignificant whether the GM determined some particular fact in advance or on the fly. Plenty of content is developed on the fly, and I generally consider it healthy, for it maintains spontaneity and flexibility better than if the GM fears stepping outside their notes. As long as the GM's motivations are pure, they can successfully make new determinations without bias. When the stakes are high they might resort to e.g. randomizations or consulting with the players to ensure impartiality.

(In case you feel compelled to deconstruct this faith in the GM, ask yourself this: would you play DiV successfully if the GM had a predetermined plot they were attempting to execute? Can you generally trust in your GM to not have such a plot in the back of his mind? Is the fact that sometimes a mere human may be imperfect in the execution of their duty a sufficient proof for how trusting in the GM in DiV is doomed to failure? If trusting in the GM to perform his duty works for DiV, why not then D&D?)

Also, regarding GMing principles: the GM may, contrary to your suggestion, make principled decisions about arbitrary things like whether zombies have life-sight or not. The principles at our table might be put to words as "present challenges", "strive for consistency of fiction" and "when in doubt err on the side of the PCs, for theirs is a difficult lot, and players are more likely to fail in defending them than the GM is in prosecuting them". We find that making principled decisions about seemingly arbitrary matters is not difficult when the creative agenda (which is what those principles mostly reflect) is clear and the GM doesn't fear to ask for consultation when in doubt.

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Regarding D&D being freeform, I largely agree. That is, the mechanical rules it has are mostly incidental, and not at the true heart of the game. The true heart lies in the creative agenda and procedures of the game - D&D has magnificent procedures despite what you say, although the richness of the play culture means that not only are the procedures often different from group to group, they are also sometimes executed wrongly.

Incidentally, these are the sort of phrasings that make me think that you're talking about subjective ass-kissing: "If you are good, you will do it. If you do it badly, you incur in the risk of irritating the GM and having him make rulings against you, or even kill your character." A GM who rules against somebody out of irritation would not remain on the seat until the end of the session at our table. That's just a drastic social faux pas, and prone to cause a poisonous atmosphere where the players attempt to please the GM in hopes of currying his favour. You should be friends with a common interest in play, not some sort of authority pyramid.

That aside, though, I think we can agree on the basic point that D&D is, indeed, essentially non-mechanical in nature. Even the procedures that you ignore do not change the fact that it is a game of discussion. However, the rich procedural nature of the game is the exact reason why your claim about it being a game of "persuade the GM" is false. I agree that if you're playing a form of D&D where the GM is god and they're always right, then your claim is valid. However, as I emphasized in the last thread, that is not under review: under review is your claim that all D&D by the nature of the game is like that. This is why I discuss my own play at length: it is clearly, unequivocally D&D, yet it's not about persuading the GM.

As an example of an important procedure, consider the requirement of consistency in rulings: this is a major, huge part of the foundation for mechanical rules to exist at all in D&D. Mechanical rules manage to exist, incidental and amorphous as they are, simply because the default procedure for resolving situations is to look at the backlog of past cases and utilize the same resolution techniques again. It's an essentially conservative process that produces what might be called "rules", which are simply rulings so basic that they are not challenged except in rare corner cases.

The existence of the above feature, which is only one minor detail in the procedural structure of the game, puts lie to the claim that it's a game of convincing the GM. At our table you can't convince the GM to give you an automatic hit in combat, the existence of the attack roll is too deeply entrenched in the common law of the campaign; the GM making such a ruling would be challenged to justify his call, and there would need to be some concrete reasons of fictional positioning (e.g. the enemy is immobile) for the judgement to pass. It can't very well be the core of the game to persuade the GM if the GM is not all-powerful, wouldn't you say?

(By the way, note how my example has the GM providing something positive and being called on it nevertheless. As I hope I've communicated, at our table the legitimacy of the process is king, and players have been known to get their own characters killed by correcting the GM when they try to go light on the PCs.)

At this juncture it is possible that the reader feels that our table is not playing "real D&D" because we quite openly repudiate the concept of the all-powerful GM. Fair enough, I'm entirely cool with finding agreement by redefining the extent of our mutual claims. "No true Scotsman" is a constant danger in discussing this topic anyway, which is why I'm so insistent about my points being merely a counter-example to prove that not all D&D is like that. I would not in my wildest dreams wish to claim that the way we play is common, it is merely one style of play that is clearly acknowledged as D&D in the local culture.

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Regarding the practicalities of gaming modules, I'll note that when I was estimating half an hour for session prep, I was specifically thinking of the simplest prep possible. A basic random dungeon or One Page Dungeon can easily be studied in that time, and it'll provide more than one session's worth of play in all likelihood. Note that as I've described above, I assume that a lot of narration is developed during play: you don't need to create the literary value and organic texture of a dungeon in advance, the bare-bones standard format is more than sufficient.

When I was refereeing in 2011-12, I prepped maybe about 30 minutes per session on average; most of that was when I decided to write my own adventures, or when I read some new modules to introduce to the campaign later. For most sessions no prep whatsoever was necessary, as I was relying on stuff I'd read earlier. Thus the prep happened in practice as an entire day spent every few months in revising the campaign. In truth, the vast majority of this time was spent in drawing and updating the overland maps. I am not, of course, counting time spent in idle thought during this time-period, despite my often finding inspiration and useful details for the game in this manner.

If you're used to spending more time, maybe your pace of play is faster? You described your D&D experiences in detail earlier, and to me they looked like traditional style of plot-dominant D&D. From what I've seen people who play like that (and my experience is mostly from the 3rd edition) don't expend as much time in planning and logistics as we do, so this might explain why you need to prep so much. I find that a single commercial adventure module usually takes at least five sessions to play through with all the planning, random encounters and other complications typical of the sandbox. Even a slighly larger and more ambitious work can easily take much more time; we're currently playing Stonehell Dungeon, for example, and after the first three sessions of play we're still merely journeying towards the dungeon and dealing with random friction of travel. I estimate that we'll be playing Stonehell itself for the entire next year, assuming something better doesn't come along. The GM specifically asked us to play this scenario next because he's busy with academical concerns, and this way he doesn't need to prep for each session anew.

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All in all, it seems to me that we don't actually have much of an interesting disagreement here: to me it seems that your claims about what D&D is really like are agreeable and credible when applied to the common sort of tomfoolery I often read about in the Internet. However, the field is vast, and not everybody plays in ways that are vulnerable to this analysis. The conclusion might just as easily be that we're not really playing D&D, or that not all D&D need be about persuading the GM; the notion that all D&D is really about persuasion, and anybody who doesn't recognize this about their own play is deluded - that seems like a more extraordinary claim.

In fact, after writing the above commentary in the interest of closing off the discussion, I am inspired to offer a consensual conclusion: if you, Moreno, are willing to agree that I know what I'm talking about and the play at our table is just as objective and systemically circumscribed as your Apocalypse World (I don't actually really know why this should be under discussion - I would have thought that you'd take it as a given that I know exactly what is happening in theoretical terms at my own table), then I'm more than happy to agree that there are vast fields of different sorts of D&D out there, and sadly quite many groups play in undisciplined ways that ultimately reduce to GM fiat.

[Ron Edwards]

Take this to your other venues of discussion, please.