How Epidiah decided range to target in Dungeon Crawl Classics

[lumpley]

We're playing DCC. There are a bunch of us. Epidiah Ravachol is the DM. We've stumbled into an encounter with some kind of evidently classic D&D monster, an animate tree stump with a lure that's shaped like a squirrel. It outclasses us brutally. It's killed two of us, and then it kills a third, one of my characters, a dwarf, who happens to be carrying all the party's treasure and heavy gear (because of his high dwarven carrying capacity).

"Okay!" Eppy says. "On its turn it drags Bobnar the Dwarf into its maw and starts eating his corpse." He's not reporting this objectively, he's deciding this and telling us his decision. It's a socially legit decision and we don't bat an eye.

"Guys," I say, "Bobnar's carrying all our treasure and heavy gear." I'm (a) reporting objectively what's written on the character sheet I have for Bobnar, which I could pass around to everyone if they asked, and (b) reminding everyone that, some time ago, they as players said that their characters gave Bobnar all their stuff. It's a socially legit statement and nobody bats an eye.

"Aw crap," we collectively say. To Eppy: "can we get hold of Bobnar's pack before the monster eats it?"

Eppy considers. He does not judge objectively. His job is to decide, not to "observe." We have agreed socially that his job is to decide questions like this. We have agreed socially to accept the decisions he makes.

"Maybe!" he says. "You'd have to get close enough to it that it'll be able to attack you. Do you try?" Again, he's not reporting the distance between our imaginary characters and his imaginary monster objectively. He's deciding, like we asked him to. Furthermore, what a great answer! He has a higher-level job, which we've all socially agreed to, which is to give us gameplay choices to make. Here he's giving us a choice, as we've asked him to, and he's using the imagery of the game to communicate to us what that choice is: "you'll be within reach of the monster" is a socially-agreed shorthand for a pretty intense and complicated set of gameplay features, all a combination of social agreement and real-world stuff like dice and numbers on character sheets.

Anyway, it's a socially legit thing for him to say. We ask and expect him to make decisions and give us choices; he's made a decision and given us a choice; we now go on to make the choice.

"Aw mother crap," we say. "No, we don't try. The thing will rip us apart. Gosh double dang it." I pass the character sheet I've kept for Bobnar over to Eppy for him to put into his RIP file, gold coins, extra weapons, folding ladder and all.

At no point did I expect Eppy to accurately measure distance in his own imagination, an absurdity. I expected him to make decisions about that kind of stuff, not "observe" it. I expected him to give me a gameplay choice and communicate to me what it was, which he did. The entire process, though it represented a loss for our side, was effortless and fully socially consensual. The entire game, start to finish, was the same as this episode: effortless, fully socially consensual, full of interesting choices for us to make, overall a loss for our side, and fun.

One more time: Eppy didn't OBSERVE how close our characters were to the monster, or how close they'd have to get to the monster in order to get back Bobnar's pack, he DECIDED. It was his decision to make, we expected him to make it, we asked him to make it, we agreed to abide by the decision he made, he made the decision, we abided by the decision he made, and NOTHING BAD HAPPENED.

-Vincent

[Ron Edwards]

Yes.

I have found it very hard to describe why "GM decides" (which is really a specific case of someone/anyone deciding, as long as we know who it's supposed to be) is not the same as the hated "GM fiat" associated with powerless and irritating play.

Lots of discussion of the Lumpley Principle, the fiction (which was intended to be an easy non-hassle obvious phrase), and Authority in the jargon crashes right on that rock and it does not have to.

[lumpley]

Yep!

Nor indeed the same as any of the problems Moreno lays at its feet, which I think are better accounted for by plain old creative differences between himself and his friends.

(Now, Ron, you know me, I don't even think it's important that we know who is to make the decision, just as long as in the moment, someone is able to make it, and the rest of us are able to recognize and accede to it when it's been made. Making it somebody's decision in particular is a good piece of game design, depending on the needs of the game, not a necessity, and happens to be the case for Dungeon Crawl Classics.)

-Vincent

[Ron Edwards]

Agreed on the parenthesis. It's just like narration of immediate outcomes, to take a simpler case. The rule might say "Bob always says," or it might say, "Whoever rolled the highest value says," or it might say "anyone says," and that's all good.

Do you have any thoughts on when it doesn't work? Because I think Moreno is talking about more than merely individual happenstance creative differences. He's talking about a culture of play (or barely "play") which I think does merit criticism, and which is wrapped up in the history of orthodoxy - not to bring that in if you don't want, just "traditions of play in and influenced by 80s TSR."

[lumpley]

Honestly? I have a friend who doesn't like card games because they feel like homework to him. To design a card game he enjoys, you have to do away with things like sorting, ordering, and grouping as fundamental components of play.

My pure guess is that D&D, like any of your or my games (take Sorcerer for instance), was a weird-ass, quirky little game designed to appeal to a relatively small audience. It's D&D's bad luck to have been so new, inspiring, and suggestive that a whole body of people outside of its natural audience tried to have fun playing it. To enjoy D&D, they constitutionally have to change fundamental components of its gameplay. I think that tension, that ongoing crisis, including all the profit stakes that TSR, Hasbro, and you and I introduced, brings us to where we are today.

But, like, I don't care about D&D as a brand or as an identity at all. That's Ars Magica for me, as I think everybody knows. My interest in D&D is entirely based on the fact that this one time, playing it with a good DM was eye-opening for me as a designer.

-Vincent

[Moreno R.]

Hi Vincent!

We're playing DCC. There are a bunch of us. Epidiah Ravachol is the DM. We've stumbled into an encounter with some kind of evidently classic D&D monster, an animate tree stump with a lure that's shaped like a squirrel.

Ah! I remember that beast! A "Wolf-in-Sheep's-Clothing". It's really old-school (but in the original version, it's a rabbit, not a squirrel).

I liked your description of that actual play bit, both because it describe well the real nature of the decisional process in these kind in situations, and because it illustrate a point that I think show a little but decisive difference between the way you play D&D and some deep-ingrained D&D social expectations.

It's right here:

Eppy considers. He does not judge objectively. His job is to decide, not to "observe." We have agreed socially that his job is to decide questions like this. We have agreed socially to accept the decisions he makes.

"Maybe!" he says. "You'd have to get close enough to it that it'll be able to attack you. Do you try?" Again, he's not reporting the distance between our imaginary characters and his imaginary monster objectively. He's deciding, like we asked him to. Furthermore, what a great answer! He has a higher-level job, which we've all socially agreed to, which is to give us gameplay choices to make.

This part shows that Epidiah's role at that table it's not a simple "simulator of a physical world", and that you have an understanding, at your table, that you playing in a "story" that you are creating by your actions, and that during the course of that story one of the GM's job is to push you into situations where you have to make dramatic choices.

It's seems so natural, so basic, especially after playing so many forgie games. A no-brainer, really. Role-playing is a conversation, the GM is asking you to choose between different fictional "paths", what could be more natural?

Well, I have played in the past with groups that would have considered Epidiah affirmation as as serious breaking of the social contract at the table....   there is an expectation, especially in groups coming from old games like D&D or GURPS, that it's not the GM's role to decide that you have a choice between only these two options. That the GM should only say to you the distance in meters, and any other physical concrete information, and it's then your "job" afterwards how to be able to "step on up" and devise a manner, a course of action, that allow you to save the equipment WITHOUT getting in the beast's range.

For example, if the group has lamp's oil (or better, Greek fire) they could throw it to the beast, flame it with a spell or a thrown torch, and get the equipment when the beast flee the burning flames. Or they could attack it with missile weapons, at a distance, out of range from the beast's attacks. Or a spell-caster in the group could summon a monster to fight for you and get you back the equipment (at low levels probably Epidiah know every spell you have memorized for the day, but inventive use of spells can go over their nominal effect: a low magic missile can be used to menace a prisoner forcing him to risk getting the equipment back rather that getting killed for sure).

This is tied somewhat to Ron's concept of "Murk": when the GM is saying to you something like "You'd have to get close enough to it that it'll be able to attack you", what is he doing? He is flatly telling you that you haver to choose one of these two course of actions, and trying to escape that choice would be a serious breach of the social contract of play, with the risk of long discussions at the table with the players asking the GM for precise details about the distance in cm between them and the monster, rate, of movement, etc, boring the other players out of their mind, or that behavior is not a breach of social contract but it's the way "good players" play in that group? And how people can play together if they don't know which of these two games they are playing?

(I lived this kind of situation, in a just-starting group, with people coming from different group with different expectations, when Michele joined our group during a long Call of Cthulhu campaign: we were playing in a very story-before way but with the understanding that the GM role was more similar to the first kind, but Michele was coming from a table of the second kind, and began to pester me for details about distance in cm, times in seconds, rate of running, etc, and passed literally hours in real time trying to force his way out of these kind of choices: the game was literally blocked for hours by this dissonance between our expectations)

If you have read or talked with a lot of D&D gamers, especially of the old-school kind, you have seen that for that kind of scene, often, that kind of micro-management where the GM has to tell you the real distance and then you can "do anything you want" is a given, a "god-given right" for players that is treated in these discussion like the NRA treat the right to bear arms: it's the last stand of "liberty" against the "story-playing hordes".  My posts about the tug-of-war between players and GM are based on observations on this kind of play.

I am not saying "you are not really playing old school": as Ron observed in these threads, nobody can really say even what D&D itself is, let alone his "old kind". I am saying that a lot of people that talks about old style gaming these days would not consider that a legit way of playing. And that the difference between these two ways to intend the GM's job is very, very deep, even if the two groups use that same dice and the same stats for the monsters, they are not playing the same game.

[I consider rather funny that the same people who usually want a GM that is "god of the gaming table, above the rules" would consider a simple choice as the one offered by Epidiah a breach of the social contract, by the way.]

P.S: reading again this post before pushing "send" I noticed that it could be read in an unintended way, as if I was saying that Epidiah or another GM in that kind of game would not accept different solutions (as in "no, you can't use arrows, in my all-powerful role of divine railroader, I limit you to these two choices!). No, that would be silly, I am not saying that. What I am saying is that in this situation Epidiah is stating the large-scale situation: the beast is eating, if you disturb him , it will attack, no matter if you attack it with swords or arrows. What he is doing is telling the situation without having to cite the exact distances in cm. In the kind of D&D play I was describing, the players would have wanted to know the cm and the exact rate of attack and movements to "persuade" him (again that word,,,) to another conclusion, that they can get the equipment avoiding the attack, and they do this citing distances in cm, rates of movements, etc.

[crosspost with the last two posts]

[lumpley]

"Good DM," by the way, in my last above, doesn't mean anything weird. It just means someone who, like Eppy, knows to make decisions when they're his to make, and knows to make them overall to give us gameplay choices.

-Vincent

[Dan Maruschak]

Vincent, are these decisions allowed to be arbitrary and capricious, or do people expect them to conform to facts and principles of some kind? (I'm lifting these terms from the "abuse of discretion" standard in US legal analysis). It seems to me that your "X decides" formulation is trying to draw a simplifying box around something that isn't necessarily simple. If confidence in the way that Eppy makes this decision is one of the things that gives the decision credibility then it seems weird to me to just say "it's his job, end of story".

It seems to me that thinking in terms of "who decides?" may be a good first approximation, but the more important question for how a game behaves dynamically is "how is the decision made?", because that will have an influence on credibility issues long-term. Might Eppy be checking the answer he wants to give against the situation he's imagining in his brain in order to make sure it's within the bounds of reasonableness, e.g. in terms of things like how thinly time-sliced actions are happening "right now" and how consequential events ought to be without a chance for characters to involve themselves? If so, would this bounds-checking be substantially different from "observing"?

[lumpley]

Dan: Those are all good questions, and I don't think we have a very good vocabulary for taking them on. Or, rather, the vocabulary we have is, correctly, gameplay, and all discussion of it must necessarily lag behind.

When is the stuff I'm imagining in my head the point of play, and when is it a mnemonic for play, and when does it inspire play? And then again for me as a player, vs for Eppy as the DM? And then again for the stuff in our individual heads, vs the stuff we've said out loud to one another? Legit questions, but not, I think, answerable ones, except by the fact and process of play itself.

-Vincent

[lumpley]

Moreno: It's a bummer when cultural or interpersonal forces keep people who have insoluble creative differences trying to play together. Is there more to say about it than that? The best outcome is either for those people to resolve their creative differences, or else to find creative outlets that don't depend on the others' participation, but of course those aren't always possible. Sometimes the only choice someone has is which kind of creative unfulfillment to suffer.

-Vincent

[Eero Tuovinen]

I agree with Dan in that in this case Vincent is largely stating the obvious: given that we observe that the GM, indeed, has the authority to make these decisions, the natural follow-up question is to ask why - how is he allowed to, or how is he supposed to make these decisions that are accepted? Are there wrong decisions and right ones, aside from the purely empirical hindsight that apparently there was something wrong with a decision that was considered problematic by the group when it was made? (The slightly quirky phrasing comes from Vincent's initial post, which greatly emphasizes the utterly unproblematic nature of the GM's call when it was done correctly - that surely is a simple proof of something being right, but what about the opposite?)

In case it helps understand the discussion so far, I'll say that I've been taking this point as a given. My discussion has mostly concerned the legitimacy (the property of being systematically credible, if you please) of the GM's call, and why that legitimacy does not derive from simple persuasion, but rather from the substance of the discourse, and the understanding of the world that the players bring to the table.

Regarding putting a choice to the players (like Epidiah did here), because it's an interesting technique: I think that simplifying glosses of complex fictional situations are very useful tools when determining positioning and available options. I think that the GM may freely make use of this technique, provided he utilizes it for the purpose of bringing play to the point of challenge; in other words, you simplify and sharpen a situation to provide for real conundrums, and not for other, illegitimate reasons (such as to ensure that a bad guy gets away, to pick a perennial favourite). This is an important point, because here we see the GM using bald decision-making power, with the only safeguard against arbitrariness being in his duty towards the shared agenda as a functionary of group. This same principle of "driving towards the challenge" can be seen in many otherwise arbitrary choices the GM makes in this style of game: given no reason to decide otherwise, choose the adventuresome option that brings clear choices forward. A naive neutrality does not produce sufficiently interesting fictional proceedings, we need to specifically choose to produce situations where player characters have a chance at risk and glory.

[lumpley]

Eero, I don't disagree with you at all. As a mere aside I'll point out that this was a time when Eppy decided to give us a monster we couldn't defeat, that offered no hope of victory or glory. This particular encounter was one where the open question was how much we'd throw away before we wised up.

Our particular social agreement for the game not only allows Eppy to legitimately decide to give us that kind of encounter, but would be disappointed if he never did.  We find being brutally outclassed sometimes comical and fun.

-Vincent

[Dan Maruschak]

As I understand it, the current mainstream thinking among psychologists is that what makes ideas "sound right" is largely whether they're congruent with other ideas that are already salient in your brain. As an example (describing from memory from books like Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman, so I could be off on the details), in a study on expertise they asked a bunch of foreign policy experts a question like "in the next ten years, what is the probability that the Soviets will invade the middle east?" (obviously a slightly dated example). And they asked a different batch "in the next ten years, what is the probability that the Soviets will invade the middle east after a major earthquake significantly degrades their own oil capacity?" The answer to the second question tends to elicit higher probabilities than the first one, even though in the abstract P[invasion] = P[invasion due to earthquakes] + P[invasion for non-earthquake reasons]. Making the earthquake story salient made "an invasion happens" seem like a more reasonable idea. This is the same reason that you can walk somebody step-by-step through an argument that leads them to agree to something that might have seemed outlandish to them if you just started with the conclusion.

I'll posit that in a "functional" game, there is enough commonality between the ideas that are currently salient in the heads of the participants that they're all generally in the same ballpark about whether any particular new contribution to the fiction will seem reasonable. Different games can achieve this in different ways. In a classic Forge-y conflict-resolution game, the players are all supposed to be primed to be paying special attention to the goals/interests of individual characters in a scene. In an AW-family game, there are a discrete list of move-triggers or pick-from-a-list options that are supposed to be guiding play. The "current fictional situation" is also obviously a component (although since we're talking about brain architecture, I think we need to start thinking about the individual-imaginary-spaces instead of just treating the SIS as an abstraction) although there can be variations in how sharp/discrete the ideas it's contributing are. If people are glossing over stuff, "storyboarding", handwaving, etc., "the fiction" in each person's brain is probably going to be flatter and not doing as good a job inserting common ideas into the brains of the participants. If people are invested in the concrete details it's more likely they'll be getting similar ideas from the fiction. "Murk" happens in a game when the set of mutually-salient ideas is too small (either in the classical "wait, I thought my character was still out in the hall?" kind of murk or the generalized murk that Ron has been talking about recently). Some games can set up things that end up getting people on different pages -- if an old-school dungeon puts a instant-death trap in a room, "death is on the line" may be an idea that's salient to the GM who is looking at the map but not to the players who don't yet have access to that hidden information.

A big element of RPG design is trying to engineer what ideas are salient to the particular players at particular times. We often leverage in-built habits or intuitions, we make allusions to common touchstones, get mutual buy-in to procedures, etc. We try to encourage focus or attention to some things and not others (e.g. an old-school equipment list might cue some players to care very much about they are a pole-arm's length away from a monster or a sword-length away). A poorly designed game can leave players with an undifferentiated sea of ideas, none of which become especially salient at any given time.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Very good, Dan! I agree with your general slant here. To put it in other words, the SIS relies in part on unspoken assumptions, and those assumptions won't conflict for players who are in tune with each other; this "being in tune" may then be improved by playing together a lot, reading similar books, having a strongly suggestive game under play, and other similar techniques. The outcome is that we need to say less aloud, "bend less iron wire" as we say in Finnish. I've got a few gamers with whom I have this sort of easy rapport naturally, no matter the game, and it's always a pleasure to be able to play with the richer SIS that occurs.

It is also an interesting design direction where a game is structured in a way that makes it unnecessary for the personal narratives of the players to harmonize. Many newer games are such that there is no need whatsoever for a singular narrative to reign triumphant in all details, as long as the key points are agreed upon. I've noticed that this has led to a pretty ironic style of play in my own circles, as we hypersaturate the narrative space with alternative viewpoints and colorful detail that might or might not be "really in the story".

As I understand it, the current mainstream thinking among psychologists is that what makes ideas "sound right" is largely whether they're congruent with other ideas that are already salient in your brain. As an example (describing from memory from books like Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman, so I could be off on the details), in a study on expertise they asked a bunch of foreign policy experts a question like "in the next ten years, what is the probability that the Soviets will invade the middle east?" (obviously a slightly dated example). And they asked a different batch "in the next ten years, what is the probability that the Soviets will invade the middle east after a major earthquake significantly degrades their own oil capacity?" The answer to the second question tends to elicit higher probabilities than the first one, even though in the abstract P[invasion] = P[invasion due to earthquakes] + P[invasion for non-earthquake reasons]. Making the earthquake story salient made "an invasion happens" seem like a more reasonable idea. This is the same reason that you can walk somebody step-by-step through an argument that leads them to agree to something that might have seemed outlandish to them if you just started with the conclusion.

I get what you're trying to say here, but you probably messed up the story in details (I've heard this before, but can't remember if I've noticed this before), because the way you describe it it's really quite unfair to the test subject, as it's relying on a semantic trick: the test subject reads P[invasion | earthquake] when the same natural sentence was apparently intended as P[invasion and earthquake]. Thing is, necessarily P[A|B] > P[A] > P[A and B] in a situation like this, so the way you describe it, the test here doesn't prove that people think P[A] < P[A and B], but simply that they thought that we were talking about P[A|B] to begin with.

Or maybe that's exactly intentional, and the point of that test was to prove that people tend to read constructively, interpreting ambiguity in a way that makes more sense to them. Seems like a sensible survival trait to me :D

[Callan S.]

Vincent, is the original post touching on the persuasion idea in some way, or just saying nothing bad happened in that actual play example?