[D&D 3.5] Authority in action (split)

[clukemula]

Good to hear that I'm actually contributing something now! I was worried for a bit.

Okay, Content and Outcome Authority seem much clearer to me now. Some thoughts:

At this point, Situational Authority seems to me to be completely a matter of Positioning. In other words, the characters' (including non-player) physical locations and interests shift until the result of one or more interests becomes uncertain, in which case resolution mechanics are invoked and Outcome Authority is applied.

To point back to my play example, the tavern scene was a chance for us to make clear some Positioning between player characters, so we shifted around slightly (physically, socially, emotionally, etc.) until the pre-decided group Outcome of "teaming up" was reached. In the fight scene, however, our physical Positioning became more important, since our Position of "wanting to fuck up the warlock" had already been established in the tavern scene. Both times, though, it was still a matter of Positioning (i.e., modifying the Situation), for the DM and the players alike.

Am I right in thinking that? Or did I just butcher Positioning and Situational Authority with one fell swoop?

I also have another question regarding Outcome Authority: would an example analogous to the Dust Devils one be in Apocalypse World, where "good," "complicated," and "bad" are the Outcomes, but the description of what good, complicated, or bad things happen falls under Narrational Authority?

As it stands, the concept of Narrational Authority is the only fuzzy, non-necessary category to me at this point. Right now it just seems at most like a subset of Outcome Authority. I can't put my finger on an example of this in play yet, so I may be way off base, but it seems like it's possible for something similar to happen with Situational Authority (the situational setup as separate the narration of the situation). I'll post an example if I can think of one.

- Luke

[Ron Edwards]

Regarding Positioning and Authority, we should clarify what makes most sense out of your phrase "... a matter of." Positioning is a character feature, whether a quality on a sheet or a stated movement in play, or anything like that. Situation is a much bigger category; I'd say, Positioning refers to many of the Techniques which establish and keep Characters firmly embedded in Situation. Or perhaps can establish, as Positioning would be

All which would go to say that Situational Authority often draws upon Positioning information, whether old (on the sheet e.g.) or new (where my guy is standing when at the moment of scene framing).

Or at least that's what comes to mind here at this moment. Any thoughts of yours are welcome.

Your example from Apocalypse World nails it in one. Which is why I'm puzzled about your final comment, because it seems to me you just showed exactly why Narrational Authority isn't merely a by-blow of Outcome Authority. It's true you can't have Narration (of this sort) unless you have an Outcome to work with, but I think that's trivial - in the same sense that you can't have Situation unless you have Content, or alternatively the potential to shore up the Situation with revealed Content.

That's really the core of all of this, isn't it? That the four things are indeed crucially causally connected in-fiction, but the Authorities across them can be distributed across people at the table, and even distribution within any one of them can also be traded about. Doing this constructively is the essence of playing without Murk, as you noted earlier I think.

Best, Ron

[clukemula]

Hmm... I'm seeing that my confusion about Narrational Authority might be just a case of wanting symmetry where there doesn't need to be any.

Looking at the categories again, as they happen chronologically in the fiction...

Content Authority is present whether any Situation is in play or not. Regardless of our characters ever walking into that tavern, that tavern could have persisted as Content. Nothing looking like normal play would have happened without a Situation, but there nonetheless could have been shared imagined Content about the tavern, what it looked like, what beverages were served there, etc. So any Situation arising, such as that of our characters being in the bar and talking to the tavern keeper about his troubles, does so out of the foundation laid by Content Authority, and when the Situation is over, anything else added to the fiction still falls under Content Authority.

The same is true of Situation to Outcome. Outcomes ("we all end up in an adventuring party") arise specifically out of Situations ("we're here in a tavern and the tavern keeper is talking to one of us"), and when it's no longer a matter of Outcome Authority, Situational Authority takes over again ("we travel through the wilderness towards the cabin"), until it ends and goes back to Content ("quaint countryside populated with at least one tavern and one warlock").

With Outcome to Narration, though, it's not a matter of Outcome being foundational to Narration so much as Outcome passing Authority off to Narration. When Narration Authority kicks in ("he gives you his gun"), it does so directly after Outcome Authority (went aggro, rolled an 8), but once Narrational Authority has done its work, there is no Outcome to go back to. Things go directly back to Situational Authority.

And that's why I said that it seems like a subset of Outcome Authority: the relationship between Outcome and Narration isn't the same as Content and Situation or Situation and Outcome. But, like I said at the beginning of this, they might not need to have the same relationship. Regardless, they're all causally connected and can indeed be productively distributed about the table.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it some more, Narrational Authority almost seems like Situational Authority in that both of them modify the Situation (especially in AW, the Narration specifically escalates Situation; I can't speak to Dust Devils, since I've never played it). Narration just does this modification as a direct result of Outcome. If that's true, then it would explain why Outcome to Narration isn't the same type of Authority change as from Content to Situation.

Thoughts?

Anyway, as far as my talk about Positioning goes, I think that's just me using "Positioning" and "Character" too broadly. I tend to think of Characters as anything that is capable of intent towards an effect, regardless of it being an individual or group, or even if it isn't normally thought of as sentient. So I think that's just a misuse on my part of terminology intended to be more specific than that.

- Luke

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Luke,

I am puzzled by your final point, because I look at characters in stories exactly the same way - if an inanimate object tangles up a hero's legs in a fight, it can be considered a combatant. I like to point to the final line in a chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring: "Caradhras had defeated them."

So whatever was causing your mental itch, I'm pretty sure that distinction wasn't it.

I'm going line by line again - not my usual recommended way to reply, but I think this is a rare instance when it will make things clearer.

Content Authority is present whether any Situation is in play or not.

Yes.

Nothing looking like normal play would have happened without a Situation, but there nonetheless could have been shared imagined Content about the tavern, what it looked like, what beverages were served there, etc. So any Situation arising, such as that of our characters being in the bar and talking to the tavern keeper about his troubles, does so out of the foundation laid by Content Authority, and when the Situation is over, anything else added to the fiction still falls under Content Authority.

Yes again. As a counter-example, in my long-ago Hero Wars game, one memorable moment came when the characters were rounding a turn on a mountain path, and they could see the dragon's bones which actually defined the mountain, partly exposed. The players were enthralled by this idea and had their characters run around for a while, just soaking up the moment. There was no Situation, or as little as there could possibly be insofar as it's needed for play. Play was as close to pure Color for pure Setting as it could get.

The same is true of Situation to Outcome. Outcomes ("we all end up in an adventuring party") arise specifically out of Situations ("we're here in a tavern and the tavern keeper is talking to one of us"), and when it's no longer a matter of Outcome Authority, Situational Authority takes over again ("we travel through the wilderness towards the cabin"), until it ends and goes back to Content ("quaint countryside populated with at least one tavern and one warlock").

Yup. Although as Moreno's thread is showing, switches in scope and rate of authority use, and which goes to which (and to whom), are quite variable. You've described a simple and easy-to-understand example.

With Outcome to Narration, though, it's not a matter of Outcome being foundational to Narration so much as Outcome passing Authority off to Narration. When Narration Authority kicks in ("he gives you his gun"), it does so directly after Outcome Authority (went aggro, rolled an 8), but once Narrational Authority has done its work, there is no Outcome to go back to. Things go directly back to Situational Authority.

Maybe. However, Moreno's example shows me that Narration-Outcome-Narration-Outcome et cetera is possible, and I'm also thinking of the distinctive qualities of a round-by-round conflict in Sorcerer, in which narrations and outcomes are very distinct, but highly dependent upon one another in sequence.

I'm getting the idea that you are moving too quickly for some large-scale, dependable principle by which to relate the four things, and perhaps it's better to go softly, game by game, speculation by speculation, thread by thread, dialogue by dialogue instead. Especially if more people start participating with threads and interpretations of their own - you don't have to wrap up the issue with a neat bow all by yourself.

Best, Ron

[clukemula]

But, but, bows are pretty.

Seriously, though, Moreno's example does make the relationship between Outcome and Narration Authority seem clearer. However, it makes Narration look even more like Situation Authority to me, albeit Situation Authority directly influenced by one or more Outcomes. In his example, the "jumping into the car and driving away" along with the "if I am hit or not and where and with how much damage" both seem to specifically modify the Situation, and therefore seem to be Situation Authority. Or am I looking at that incorrectly?

Regarding my use of "Positioning"... Looking at the tavern again, it was all just Content until Positioning arose on the part of our characters and the tavern keeper. For our characters, the Positioning was our location in the tavern as well as a general openness to adventuring (an implied Position that was fully present in all of our characters). For the tavern keeper, it was also his location in the tavern along with his desire to get his daughter back, and his lack of strength/bravery/whatever to do it himself. These Positions set the Content in motion, giving rise to the Situation of "we're here in a tavern and the tavern keeper is talking to one of us." Without the Positioning (i.e., any vectors of physical, social, mental, etc. movement (intent) on the part of any Character), it would have remained Content. Or am I missing or misusing something here?

- Luke

[clukemula]

Actually, let me change that. The "if I am hit or not and where and with how much damage" doesn't seem to modify the Situation, and just looks like Outcome Authority to me. The "jumping into the car and driving away" definitely still looks like Situation Authority to me, though.

- Luke

(By the way, this double post is here because I can't figure out how to edit a post, even within the one minute after submitting it that the general rules allow. Sorry about that.)

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Luke,

Outcomes modify a Situation by definition; think of them as smaller Situation authority from the inside-out and as driving in-Situation time forward in a consequential way. Or what I'm trying to say is that the old Situation is still there, and for Situation authority to get invoked again, the current one has to have come to some kind of break.

Film and prose have arrived at many interesting ways to crosscut and establish parallel among several situations, so that they develop and resolve in a highly effective montage, whether simultaneous in the fiction or not. Role-playing techniques for this remain primitive, although I've tried to work with that variable, most obviously in Spione. Therefore at the moment, we can talk about "the" Situation and account for nearly all role-playing experiences to date.

Your Positioning summary seems pretty good to me. The only other bit that you (belatedly) mentioned was that your half-orc bard did get a little flak from someone at one point, which counts as Positioning too.

Best, Ron

[clukemula]

Hey Ron, sorry for the delayed response.

I get that Outcomes modify Situation, just like Situations modify Content. I should have been more specific: while Situation Authority modifies it and leaves it open to further modification, Outcome Authority modifies the Situation and closes it off to further modification (at whatever scale it's operating at).

What I'm having a hard time with is that I can't see, in any example so far, what Narration Authority does differently. So far, all I see it doing is being tied with Outcome Authority (and in no way distinct from it) or modifying and leaving open a Situation (at whatever scale). The only difference between Narration and Situation Authorities in Moreno's AW example that I can see is that Narration comes about as a direct result of the Outcome.

All that said, I have a feeling I might be missing something obvious here. I just can't tell what it might be.

Oh, and yes, my half-orc bard did get flak, but not until the next session (which is why I forgot to mention it as Positioning here). But considering all of that, do you still say that Situation is more than the sum total of all relevant Positioning? If so, what more is there?

- Luke

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Luke,

Those questions are getting pretty abstract for me. Given long years at the Forge, I've found that when discussions get more and complex about finer and finer details, they tend to lose their utility. I'll try to deal with that by getting very focused on real play examples.

It also strikes me that something I feel or perceive keenly in play - especially across multiple designs - may not be as distinct for others. I don't know whether the way I see it is simply a matter of directing others' attention, or a matter of plain and simple difference of viewpoint. If it's the latter, then I don't want to be in the position of cuffing someone repeatedly and saying, "Just look at it right, for God's sake." So I ask that we reserve the possibility that we don't agree, without it being a problem.

OK, so let's see about this Narration authority thing. At its simplest and probably most familiar, let's go to playing D&D 3.25 (as I like to call it; I used 3.0 and 3.5 core books essentially at random during play), with any of the ordinary damage rolls we utilized in four or five sessions. I want to consider two things:

i) The quantitative damage roll itself, when acknowledged verbally, which is to say, when someone says the number and its relevance is either immediately understood or immediately explained. This may or may not involve secondary mechanics, but in the case of a standard D&D hit from this design era, armor and so on have already been accounted for, so doing 9 hits of damage means exactly that. Specifically, 9 less than whatever the target currently has - so this could be a nice start to whittling it down from umpty-ump, or the finishing blow if we've already done the heavy lifting, or perhaps it's most relevant in tandem with someone else's tactic, like a spell or whatever.

ii) The description of what happens. In this case, almost all of the description seems like it's Color, but it's important in two ways, well, actually three. The first is that without any narration at all, the SIS doesn't change. Even in groups accused of being absurdly SIS-light, you still hear phrases like "I hit!" which in terms of pure numbers, are unnecessary. I maintain that all outcomes need "finishing" of this kind, which is more than Color (and typically includes it) - it's cementing into Exploration what until that second was only Techniques. The second is that the narration is itself a window for modification, again, more than Color (which would be for instance a gruesome sound effect), but circumstantial. Although nowhere in these or any other D&D rules do they say, "When you describe what happens, you can change it a little," I see it all the time in play, sometimes as an effective Force tactic, sometimes as group-celebrated Director Stance. And perhaps less groovy, this is also the moment in which the description can reveal previously-hidden information - "It doesn't seem to notice!" Players respond: "What? Oh shit!" as the DM's prep is revealed.

Now let's try that with a very concrete example from the same game. Eladd the vile wizard is escaping from a hot fight on his Instant Steed, it's Dan's turn, and acting on a broad hint, he has his character Forin use Mage Hand to stick a spear into the horse's spokes legs to trip it and thus pitch Eladd to the ground. In this case, there's no roll; the spell description clearly makes this action utterly legal, and when he says it on his God-given moment of announced action during the round, Forin does it. I see whether Eladd makes his Agility save; he does not, so he hits the ground and takes fall-and-sprawl damage.

I hope you can see that although this is exquisitely done by the rules, it also requires me, as narrator, to say things like "Eladd goes over the horse's head - can he land safely?" Or anything like that. Perhaps I would have bagged all that and simply knocked him out. Perhaps I would have said he rolled once to stay in his saddle, and then if not, to keep from going over the horse's head, and then if not, whether he lands OK ... What I'm saying here is that narration in this case had a great deal to do in establishing what aspects of the system were going to be called into play - i.e., it is required to raise the next question as a core functional feature. I submit that the rules in that game leave such a gaping window right there, that one can practically arrive at a taxonomy of DMing based on that variable alone (what you do with that window) to which any other detail of DMing differences can be considered a mere footnote.

See [D&D 3.0/3.5] Spells and swords - fight! for the thread about that session, if you're interested.

Now let's try that yet again with Dust Devils. This game differs profoundly from any application of the 3.0/3.5 D&D rules I've ever seen, done, or heard of, because the "roll" (draw really) concerns only the Outcome, stopping shorter of any concrete - in fact, narrated - material than any other game I know of with this degree of fine-grained resolution.

Geez, this would have been ... almost ten years ago, playing with the very early version of the rules. Maura's character, a very cranky half-Indian woman if I recall correctly, fired her rifle at one of the ruffians pursuing her into the town square. Her hand beat his with all kinds of points to use (I won't go into the mechanics; they've changed a lot from them anyway.) The immediate situation was complex; there were about six characters all shooting at one another or otherwise causing mayhem.

In Dust Devils, all hands are revealed at once and there's no real order derived from the cards. The order of what happens depends on the narration, although every "X beats Y" has to be accounted for. (So the narrator cannot obviate a victorious exchange by pre-empting it with something else.) And here's even more so: the narrator also interprets the numerical comparison extremely freely. In the case of a "spades" damage situation, which this one was, the cards told us all that the ruffian was going to take on a huge penalty from this damage. But that's all. Exactly what she did to him was open to narration: the bullet might have hit the horse, so he was thrown; the bullet might have creased his scalp and knocked him out; the bullet ... well, anything you want, as long as it results in physically-manifested penalties.

In this game, the narrator is the person with the highest card in hand, regardless of what that has to do with the conflicts. So it's not "winner narrates" or "player narrates," it's simply who holds that card. Conflict results are done by poker score, so the winner is often not the narrator.

I was the narrator. I had the bullet take the ruffian between the eyes, and he was dead before he hit the ground. And I did this as part of my description of what happened, i.e., exactly when we were getting Techniques-based Outcomes into the Exploration level.

What I'm trying to illustrate with these three examples is that consequential narration is sometimes squished right into the same thing as stating the rules-dictated consequences of the Outcome, but sometimes it is much different - and that this distinction is not merely a simple matter of "traditional like D&D" vs. "pervy Forge shit like Dust Devils." I think it's a key design and play issue, especially since it's also something a group can arrive at without knowing it, and apply to new games without knowing they're gumming up the way this rules-set does it.

Does that make sense? (when I ask this, I mean it very literally, without the implication that "it certainly does and do you see it.")

Best, Ron

[clukemula]

Hey Ron,

Yes, that absolutely makes sense (and not in a "I don't get it but I'm sure you must be right" kind of way). The Dust Devils example especially makes it obvious how Narration modifies the Outcome, instead of just talking about the specifics of it or setting up more Situation. So consider me on board for all the Authority categories at this point.

- Luke

[clukemula]

Hey Ron,

Out of curiosity, was Plot Authority supposed to be something like Outcome Authority for the big (session-level) Situation?

- Luke

[Ron Edwards]

Oh God, who knows. Whatever you imagine my reasoning might have been is probably more sensible than whatever it really was.

I'm pretty set on the current construction, although not necessarily on the word "authority." Even if the notion I previously held was sensible, I can't imagine how I thought the very term "plot authority" would be non-toxic in the context of role-playing history.

Best, Ron