In the variants I know (3, 3.5, 4, Next/5, and the old white box) what we now think of as a hard move falls in the general area of "GM's discretion" when narrating the results of failure. There is no explicit encouragement to GMs to complicate the situation in the way that AW or DW do with hard moves.
Depending on how you look at it, often the problem with D&D is you only have absolute success or failure, and failure is either consequence free or a hard move ... there are no soft moves... Failed your lock pick roll? Well, 'hard move', that portion of the dungeon is inaccessible.
4E at least suggested that a failure in a "skill challenge" simply lead to another path - possibly more difficult (or less easy) - which would lead to any number of other things.
Fail the climb check on a 100' ascent? Make another roll to catch yourself. Or, have a giant eagle swoop in and grab you... for dinner. Or, just get tangled up in the ropes for some time and get a wandering monster check. Etc.
My experience has been that most D&D GMs faced with failure make it a non-operation (ie. nothing happens). When it's something like a climb check they often jump to letting other PCs "check to save you". I don't think any of that comes from the actual game materials though. The systems mostly are silent on what a GM should do in a situation like that.
Fascinating. I don't remember any rules for botching, and don't see any in the d20sd. Variants have them. Vivian Spartacus hilarious. Yeah, there was at least always this culture around Wish of making it bad for players. Any idea if that was in published rules? It is at least not in the d20srd.
Eva Schiffer Yeah, the failure as nothing seems to be the closest to what's implied by the rules; if the rules have nothing to say, then is there anything going on?
Yanni Cooper Right, success or failure. And both in the most obvious way, not the more narrativist consequences in PbtA.
So -- a GM appearing more monsters on a low roll for a door, where the door wasn't particularly important, and there wasn't prep surrounding it? Within GM discretion, a hack, or a dick move?
Official rules are pretty cut and dry for D&D. You either pass or you fail. There's not much of a sliding scale or built-in follow-up anywhere I can think of.
Total dick move. If the rules don't explicitly say you can do it, then not only is that GM a dick, he's probably a terrorist, too. Everyone knows the only way you can be a good GM is if a book specifically tells you what to do and you do it, always, without tweaking it to your liking. It's common knowledge that RPGs are meant to be unflinchlingly rigid in their interpretation and implementation.
That's why DW is so great. It tells you to make shit up on the spot. What other game is there that actually says "make something up?"
I think 5E gave it a pretty good shot, saying something along the lines of "the DM is the boss and can ignore/change/hack any rules she wants." Departure from 4E which firmly tied the DMs hands behind her back. Man, did I ever get jumped on running a 4E game... Do not miss. :)
I grew up in the "the dungeon master is God, and if you annoy her, rocks fall and everyone dies" school of thought. So this whole, you have to do what the book says stuff never really affected me as much. Of course, today, I use my powers for good :)
I think there's room for more than one way to play D&D. I admit, I have been a proponent of the "there should be a risk of a TPK" in games. But I am also a big proponent of "characters and story are more important than dice rolling, and fun for the players is the most important of all." And I've rarely killed off a PC where the end result wasn't good for character, and story, and fun.
Todd Sprang I'm not even sure I'm a fan of that; where I am now, the GM is playing a game, as are the players. That is, there's a difference between game design and game mastering. I can wear both hats -- I'm not sure how well -- but I don't want to wear the game design hat while running a game. That'll just lead to confusion for everyone.
Vivian Spartacus I'm aware of that school of that, though it hasn't appealed to me for ... 10 years? More?
Eva Schiffer ooohhh, an essay!
I'm about to have a meeting, and will check in afterwards. Be nice to each other.
Eva Schiffer This essay is very much in line with my own thinking. As I've talked about before: Fiasco saved roleplaying for me, and DW/PbtA taught me there are rules for the GM, and that campaigns can exist in systems that do what I want.
D&D doesn't really have rules for hard moves on failure because it doesn't really have rules for failure at all outside of combat. You bring your set of meta-assumptions about how to play rpgs and slot them in. AW/DW makes these meta-assumptions explicit. Those games style their assumptions as rules, but they're better understood as best practices that can be imported into any game. Indie games have developed and laid out quite a few of these best practices over the years - "say yes or roll the dice" and "let it ride" being two major examples. The key insight of AW is that a randomizer should provide the following three outcomes: success, success with cost/partial success, and failure that moves the story forward. Torchbearer shows how to apply this to binary resolution: success = success, failure = GM chooses success with cost or hard move. Works just as well, basically, particularly if the GM discusses the consequences of the roll with the player before dice come out.
Once you have these ideas (say yes or roll the dice; let it ride; set stakes before rolling; outcomes are yes/yes but/no and) ingrained as your background assumptions about how to GM, you can go back to virtually any trad rpg and have a good time. It was quite a shock to discover this, but in my experience it's a pretty robust result. System matters, but not quite as much as people sometimes claim.
I should note that there are lots of other best practices from indie rpgs that go into making random trad games fun beyond just stuff around rolling the dice - how to prep for play, how to create situations that engage players, how to encourage and respond to player agency, share spotlight, etc. And the set of best practices is a toolkit - in a given game, you won't use them all, but rather pick and choose. But it's doing yourself a disservice to think of the insights of the games you play as "rules" unique to those systems as opposed to broader practices for rpgs in general.
Sam Zeitlin I think that's right on: such things are, at best, extra-system in dnd. That is, neither the rules nor advice for the GM lead towards thinking of soft/hard moves. Rather, it is the training we get from PbtA and other games.
So, to make hard and soft moves in dnd may well be within the prerogative of the GM (though this is no where stated?), but credit for it cannot --and must not - be given to the DnD system. That sound right?
To be fair William Nichols, that style of play was hardly invented by AW. It's a GMing style that was around for many years prior. AW's innovation was putting it into the rules. (I will now wax philosophical and tell you kids to get off my lawn :)
Before the Internet, conversations about GMing style (or should I say, DMing style) were frequent and house rules were often used to implement stylistic preferences. I don't think I ever played in a D&D game that didn't use house rules to a greater or lesser extent. It was a part of the culture and a part of the game. One of the most common types of house rules were critical fumble systems. Essentially, critical fumbles were designed to make failure more interesting. And while some critical fumble systems were simply extensions of the regular rules (take more damage), most of them allowed the GM some leeway in determining how the results would play out. Remember also that the GM was generally rolling behind a screen in those days. It was a frequent (although controversial) practice to fudge dice rolls to make the game more interesting. No where in the gamebooks did it say to do this, but the way that the game was set up, the very presence of the screen in the first place, certainly encouraged it.
Vivian Spartacus That's in line with my experiences. What AW did for me was to say the GM is also playing a game. That design had reached a point where GMs didn't need to do gaming design mid-game. And that's pretty amazing, given where we were in the 90s.
For me it really comes down to rules-lightness. While a game that has a mechanic to provide directly for degrees of success/failure is a very clever and solid solution, I think I do ok without the mechanic by just winging it. I prefer being able to say the failure really did end in "nothing" or that it ended in soft or hard somethings. So I'm just happy to have OSR options, because Mathfinder and 4e near-killed RPGs for me.
i'd say yes in general that's true. however, hackmaster is considered osr for some reason, and it's the crunchiest rule set i've ever seen. elegant crunch, but crunch nonetheless. otherwise: osric, swords & wizardry, dcc, dungeon world, c&c. those all are less codified and put more power into the gm's hands.
my personal observation is that when the game has deep/complex rules covering "everything", the power/creativity/flexibility of the gm gets sucked out of the room. gm goes from judge and final arbiter to rules mediator, and can even be attacked by rules lawyers and power gamers.
i think what we like is when the gm has great latitude in decision-making. rules-heavy games ease the decision-making, which might be nice for some, but can feel very constraining. rules-light leaves the options to the gm, and this is ideal for me.
and the above are all on a spectrum. dcc and dungeon world are probably the least codified. you get more of a framework for gameplay than a strict set of rules. c&c, osric and so on are a lot like 1st edition d&d with much spelled out but a lot left to dm discretion.
Wow... I'm going to have to disagree about your evaluation of DW as putting more power in the GM's hands. DW specifically delegates a big chunk of stuff that historically belongs to the GM to the group as a whole (like deciding when a roll is called for and which roll to use). I've certainly seen GMs disregard this part of the rules, but it's written in there very clearly.
Eva Schiffer For clarification: You are disagreeing with Todd's assertion that DW gives options to the GM in virtue of being rules-lite? And, it sounds like, you'd say that a rules lite game can restrict the GM just as much as a rules heavy one?
Related question: anybody recall if the various powers of GM were in the old dnd source books, or if they were a matter of oral tradition?
William Nichols I agree that DW is relatively rules light, but I think it is far more restrictive of the GM's control over the world than traditional D&D variants. This is actually one of the things I like about DW: it gives the GM a more restricted space for creativity but also gives them a lot more guidance on how to manage the world and the PCs role in it. The game also explicitly gives players limited narrative control beyond their PCs via many of the moves, which the GM is not allowed to say no to (a big departure from the traditional GM role).
I haven't run a DW game so I'll take your word for it. This was just my impression from reading the rules. Seemed to encourage more creativity from the GM than, say, 4e.
Also, why Hackmaster is old school (duh): very un-heroic take on FRPG.
In the variants I know (3, 3.5, 4, Next/5, and the old white box) what we now think of as a hard move falls in the general area of "GM's discretion" when narrating the results of failure. There is no explicit encouragement to GMs to complicate the situation in the way that AW or DW do with hard moves.
ReplyDeleteHouse rules/DM discretion only. DCC has tables with varying degrees of success.
ReplyDeleteProbably the best analog is the advice to the GM when the players cast the Wish spell :)
ReplyDeleteDepending on how you look at it, often the problem with D&D is you only have absolute success or failure, and failure is either consequence free or a hard move ... there are no soft moves... Failed your lock pick roll? Well, 'hard move', that portion of the dungeon is inaccessible.
ReplyDelete4E at least suggested that a failure in a "skill challenge" simply lead to another path - possibly more difficult (or less easy) - which would lead to any number of other things.
ReplyDeleteFail the climb check on a 100' ascent? Make another roll to catch yourself. Or, have a giant eagle swoop in and grab you... for dinner. Or, just get tangled up in the ropes for some time and get a wandering monster check. Etc.
My experience has been that most D&D GMs faced with failure make it a non-operation (ie. nothing happens). When it's something like a climb check they often jump to letting other PCs "check to save you". I don't think any of that comes from the actual game materials though. The systems mostly are silent on what a GM should do in a situation like that.
ReplyDeleteFascinating. I don't remember any rules for botching, and don't see any in the d20sd. Variants have them.
ReplyDeleteVivian Spartacus hilarious. Yeah, there was at least always this culture around Wish of making it bad for players. Any idea if that was in published rules? It is at least not in the d20srd.
Eva Schiffer Yeah, the failure as nothing seems to be the closest to what's implied by the rules; if the rules have nothing to say, then is there anything going on?
Yanni Cooper Right, success or failure. And both in the most obvious way, not the more narrativist consequences in PbtA.
Todd Sprang That sounds right, too.
So -- a GM appearing more monsters on a low roll for a door, where the door wasn't particularly important, and there wasn't prep surrounding it? Within GM discretion, a hack, or a dick move?
ReplyDeleteOfficial rules are pretty cut and dry for D&D. You either pass or you fail. There's not much of a sliding scale or built-in follow-up anywhere I can think of.
ReplyDeleteI think it's an interesting option. Why not?
ReplyDeleteTotal dick move. If the rules don't explicitly say you can do it, then not only is that GM a dick, he's probably a terrorist, too. Everyone knows the only way you can be a good GM is if a book specifically tells you what to do and you do it, always, without tweaking it to your liking. It's common knowledge that RPGs are meant to be unflinchlingly rigid in their interpretation and implementation.
ReplyDeleteThat's why DW is so great. It tells you to make shit up on the spot. What other game is there that actually says "make something up?"
I think 5E gave it a pretty good shot, saying something along the lines of "the DM is the boss and can ignore/change/hack any rules she wants." Departure from 4E which firmly tied the DMs hands behind her back. Man, did I ever get jumped on running a 4E game... Do not miss. :)
ReplyDeleteI grew up in the "the dungeon master is God, and if you annoy her, rocks fall and everyone dies" school of thought. So this whole, you have to do what the book says stuff never really affected me as much. Of course, today, I use my powers for good :)
ReplyDeleteI wrote an entire essay on why the old school of thought drives me up the wall.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.1000d4.com/2013/07/25/failure-in-rpgs-and-why-i-love-dungeon-world/
I think there's room for more than one way to play D&D. I admit, I have been a proponent of the "there should be a risk of a TPK" in games. But I am also a big proponent of "characters and story are more important than dice rolling, and fun for the players is the most important of all." And I've rarely killed off a PC where the end result wasn't good for character, and story, and fun.
ReplyDeleteTodd Sprang I'm not even sure I'm a fan of that; where I am now, the GM is playing a game, as are the players. That is, there's a difference between game design and game mastering. I can wear both hats -- I'm not sure how well -- but I don't want to wear the game design hat while running a game. That'll just lead to confusion for everyone.
ReplyDeleteVivian Spartacus I'm aware of that school of that, though it hasn't appealed to me for ... 10 years? More?
Eva Schiffer ooohhh, an essay!
I'm about to have a meeting, and will check in afterwards. Be nice to each other.
Eva Schiffer This essay is very much in line with my own thinking. As I've talked about before: Fiasco saved roleplaying for me, and DW/PbtA taught me there are rules for the GM, and that campaigns can exist in systems that do what I want.
ReplyDeleteD&D doesn't really have rules for hard moves on failure because it doesn't really have rules for failure at all outside of combat. You bring your set of meta-assumptions about how to play rpgs and slot them in. AW/DW makes these meta-assumptions explicit. Those games style their assumptions as rules, but they're better understood as best practices that can be imported into any game. Indie games have developed and laid out quite a few of these best practices over the years - "say yes or roll the dice" and "let it ride" being two major examples. The key insight of AW is that a randomizer should provide the following three outcomes: success, success with cost/partial success, and failure that moves the story forward. Torchbearer shows how to apply this to binary resolution: success = success, failure = GM chooses success with cost or hard move. Works just as well, basically, particularly if the GM discusses the consequences of the roll with the player before dice come out.
ReplyDeleteOnce you have these ideas (say yes or roll the dice; let it ride; set stakes before rolling; outcomes are yes/yes but/no and) ingrained as your background assumptions about how to GM, you can go back to virtually any trad rpg and have a good time. It was quite a shock to discover this, but in my experience it's a pretty robust result. System matters, but not quite as much as people sometimes claim.
I should note that there are lots of other best practices from indie rpgs that go into making random trad games fun beyond just stuff around rolling the dice - how to prep for play, how to create situations that engage players, how to encourage and respond to player agency, share spotlight, etc. And the set of best practices is a toolkit - in a given game, you won't use them all, but rather pick and choose. But it's doing yourself a disservice to think of the insights of the games you play as "rules" unique to those systems as opposed to broader practices for rpgs in general.
Sam Zeitlin I think that's right on: such things are, at best, extra-system in dnd. That is, neither the rules nor advice for the GM lead towards thinking of soft/hard moves. Rather, it is the training we get from PbtA and other games.
ReplyDeleteSo, to make hard and soft moves in dnd may well be within the prerogative of the GM (though this is no where stated?), but credit for it cannot --and must not - be given to the DnD system. That sound right?
To be fair William Nichols, that style of play was hardly invented by AW. It's a GMing style that was around for many years prior. AW's innovation was putting it into the rules. (I will now wax philosophical and tell you kids to get off my lawn :)
ReplyDeleteBefore the Internet, conversations about GMing style (or should I say, DMing style) were frequent and house rules were often used to implement stylistic preferences. I don't think I ever played in a D&D game that didn't use house rules to a greater or lesser extent. It was a part of the culture and a part of the game. One of the most common types of house rules were critical fumble systems. Essentially, critical fumbles were designed to make failure more interesting. And while some critical fumble systems were simply extensions of the regular rules (take more damage), most of them allowed the GM some leeway in determining how the results would play out. Remember also that the GM was generally rolling behind a screen in those days. It was a frequent (although controversial) practice to fudge dice rolls to make the game more interesting. No where in the gamebooks did it say to do this, but the way that the game was set up, the very presence of the screen in the first place, certainly encouraged it.
Vivian Spartacus That's in line with my experiences. What AW did for me was to say the GM is also playing a game. That design had reached a point where GMs didn't need to do gaming design mid-game. And that's pretty amazing, given where we were in the 90s.
ReplyDeleteFor me it really comes down to rules-lightness. While a game that has a
ReplyDeletemechanic to provide directly for degrees of success/failure is a very
clever and solid solution, I think I do ok without the mechanic by just
winging it. I prefer being able to say the failure really did end in
"nothing" or that it ended in soft or hard somethings. So I'm just happy to
have OSR options, because Mathfinder and 4e near-killed RPGs for me.
Todd Sprang That's interesting, and suggests that the OSR products may be rules lighter than PbtA/DW games. Does that seem true?
ReplyDeletei'd say yes in general that's true. however, hackmaster is considered osr for some reason, and it's the crunchiest rule set i've ever seen. elegant crunch, but crunch nonetheless. otherwise: osric, swords & wizardry, dcc, dungeon world, c&c. those all are less codified and put more power into the gm's hands.
ReplyDeletemy personal observation is that when the game has deep/complex rules covering "everything", the power/creativity/flexibility of the gm gets sucked out of the room. gm goes from judge and final arbiter to rules mediator, and can even be attacked by rules lawyers and power gamers.
i think what we like is when the gm has great latitude in decision-making. rules-heavy games ease the decision-making, which might be nice for some, but can feel very constraining. rules-light leaves the options to the gm, and this is ideal for me.
and the above are all on a spectrum. dcc and dungeon world are probably the least codified. you get more of a framework for gameplay than a strict set of rules. c&c, osric and so on are a lot like 1st edition d&d with much spelled out but a lot left to dm discretion.
Wow... I'm going to have to disagree about your evaluation of DW as putting more power in the GM's hands. DW specifically delegates a big chunk of stuff that historically belongs to the GM to the group as a whole (like deciding when a roll is called for and which roll to use). I've certainly seen GMs disregard this part of the rules, but it's written in there very clearly.
ReplyDeleteEva Schiffer For clarification: You are disagreeing with Todd's assertion that DW gives options to the GM in virtue of being rules-lite? And, it sounds like, you'd say that a rules lite game can restrict the GM just as much as a rules heavy one?
ReplyDeleteRelated question: anybody recall if the various powers of GM were in the old dnd source books, or if they were a matter of oral tradition?
William Nichols I agree that DW is relatively rules light, but I think it is far more restrictive of the GM's control over the world than traditional D&D variants. This is actually one of the things I like about DW: it gives the GM a more restricted space for creativity but also gives them a lot more guidance on how to manage the world and the PCs role in it. The game also explicitly gives players limited narrative control beyond their PCs via many of the moves, which the GM is not allowed to say no to (a big departure from the traditional GM role).
ReplyDeleteI haven't run a DW game so I'll take your word for it. This was just my impression from reading the rules. Seemed to encourage more creativity from the GM than, say, 4e.
ReplyDeleteAlso, why Hackmaster is old school (duh): very un-heroic take on FRPG.