Maybe-Mathematical Musings

It must be possible to build a horror property based on Winnie the Pooh that makes use of and engages with the source text in an interesting and thoughtful way rather than falling back on the cheap shock iconoclasm of "Oh, look, Pooh is killing people." Same for Thomas The Tank Engine, same for, I don't know. Teletubbies. Those first two were the only two where there's a really obvious angle of any kind that I'm frustrated about people ignoring, now I'm just naming shows for small children. Gesturing wildly

Are you familiar with GURPS Fantasy II from GURPS 3e?

There is absolutely no reason you should have been, to be clear. But given this repeated desire, you should go read that review, because they seem like you would be interested.

Every time I talk about how Dungeons & Dragons as a culture of play (i.e., as distinct from any particular published iteration of the game called Dungeons & Dragons) tends to put the GM in the position of doing all the actual work of making the game happen, and how the idea that only the GM has any responsibility for understanding and carrying out the rules is a big part of this, I always get jokers going "well ACTUALLY that's not true because I don't use the rules as written when I run games – I just make up the mechanics as I go."

Buddy, the notion that inventing a whole new game on the fly to suit the exact preferences of the group is an entry-level skill that ought to be expected – even demanded! – of any GM, regardless of their experience level, is itself an expression of the idea that responsibility for understanding and carrying out the rules rests solely with the GM.

Like, there's a reason D&D as a culture of play thinks it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a funny joke; if it didn't, we'd have to acknowledge that something is askew.

(It's kind of perplexing that there's so much pushback to discussing this. I'm not singling D&D out as exceptionally bad. It's more common than not for popular multiplayer games to have toxic cultures of play; for many genres of video games it's practically proverbial. Heck, even for tabletop RPGs, acknowledging toxic cultures of play surrounding particular games isn't a novelty – just ask anyone who's old enough to remember what the culture of play surrounding Vampire: The Masquerade was like back in the 1990s, or any fan of the various Warhammer-adjacent RPGs today. Bring this up in the context of Dungeons & Dragons, though, and suddenly the idea that tabletop RPGs have discernible cultures of play is treated as something radical!)

Like white Americans, D&D doesn't have a culture.

As a GM, my choice to play a Shepard Tone continuously throughout this one-shot has had exactly the psychological effects I wanted.

As a person who is also playing this game...I feel I have erred.

"I never thought background tones would drive ME crazy," sobs DM who played Driving People Crazy Background Tone.

Wait, Charles Stross came up with the Githyanki and Githzerai in D&D? Huh. TIL.

Oh no, it's worse than that.

George R.R. Martin came up with the Githyanki in 1977, for his novel Dying of the Light. Charles Stross wrote them up for D&D and they in the Fiend Folio in 1979.

The story I've heard is that Stross was a young writer, and didn't understand how IP worked, so he figured it was fine to swipe the name. And then Martin kind of refused to understand how IP worked, and shrugged and said "stole it fair and square, I guess".

And granted, I do tend to notice this stuff less when I'm playing pen and paper than when I'm playing computer adaptations, because there's a lot of stupid rules bullshit that a good GM can work around, and anyway optimization tends to matter less in a lot of those games anyway (you do get some pretty hardcore munchkins in tabletop as well, but usually not as many). Half my complaint is that the only people that feel like they actually give any thought to all the things you can't just expect a GM to fudge and kludge about are Larian and Torment-era Black Isle.

This is one of the reasons I think weapon specialization is an absolutely clown-shit set of feats in CRPGs especially. I mean it's not a good idea to make it basically mandatory for martial and hybrid characters to pick one weapon out of 1,789 to stay on the power curve (especially in systems like Pathfinder 1E that make it a prerequisite for a bunch of other useful feats) in pen and paper either, but at least the GM can be like "this madlad decided to specialize in falcatas despite probably thinking that's a type of pizza because they're OP for crit builds, guess if I want to give them an upgrade I'll make the boss carry a falcata."

In CRPGs, though, you don't have a GM, and so they really contribute to the whole "there are no meaningful gearing choices and 95% of items you find are just vendor trash" effect. In many JRPGs, or for that matter Western RPGs that aren't based on pen and paper, I actually, prodigium prodigiorum, have to occasionally think about whether a new gear piece that dropped will compliment my build, and consider various costs and benefits to equipping it. Maybe I'll even trade off items depending on the content I'm doing! Crazy, right?

Weapon specialization basically only works in two situations. One is if the weapons are a purely cosmetic thing: my fighter "specializes in swords" in the sense that whatever weapon he's carrying will be a sword. This requires you to either not have a loot-based play cycle, or to make enchantments basically transferable.

The other is the JRPGs version, which isn't a build option, but basically a character class. Yuffie can only use shuriken, and shuriken can only be used by Yuffie. that means that when you find a shuriken it's a Yuffie upgrade and when you find anything else it's not. And it leads to the ridiculous thing where you get to a new town and the store has one sword, one spear, one shuriken, one glove, one revolver, one megaphone(?) and one arm-mounted machine gun(??).

You could even adapt this to tabletop, and just accept that if the ninja is underperforming the DM is gonna start dropping kick-ass shuriken and if the wizard is overperforming then you're not gonna see a new staff any time soon. But that's a very different model, and doesn't translate at all to single-player CRPGs.

I do think it's interesting that Kingmaker seems to consider defiling sacred sites, even ones constructed by kobolds (who are constitutionally evil-aligned, and whose lives and safety the game doesn't expect a good-aligned character to have a whole lot of concern for) to be an evil action, and leaving them alone to be a good action.

It's interesting because in real life I'd nod my head at this, not because I think sacred sites are special or inherently good but because "don't destroy your opponents sacred places" is a decent rule to minimize the hardships of conflict. But I'm a universe where there are actual evil gods who are big on suffering there really is a good reason to prevent them from being worshipped! You don't want too many people being able to channel negative energy!

D&D (and derivatives) has always been pretty incoherent in how it thinks about religion, because there are several completely different paradigms that all get mixed in together by a bunch of different authors.

One of the paradigms is manichean. Good gods are good, evil gods are evil, and we and our good gods need to defeat them and their evil gods.

One of the paradigms takes the whole Great Wheel thing seriously. Every alignment is equally #valid and having too much good is just as bad as having too much evil. This is a major conceit in Dragonlance, and by god is it incoherent there, but it is in fact there, incoherent.

And one paradigm is the, like, naive American Lapsed Christian "religion is spirituality is, like, good, man". Worshipping Good gods is good and worshipping Evil gods is also good because the act of worship is good and divine etc.

(See also I'm pretty sure in at least one ruleset, "Consecrate" is Good and "Desecrate" is Evil, but you need Consecrate to make any type of holy site, and so by the rules Evil clerics can't actually consecrate altars to their gods.)

Larry Niven's novelette "What Good is a Glass Dagger" isn't generally super well remembered; to the extent people think of it, it's in relation to the much more famous sequel, "The Magic Goes Away", which used magic as a metaphor for the oil and energy crisis.

(It's also one of the first stories to use the word "mana" to refer to magic power; it's still exotic enough that Niven italicizes it in the text. It's not the first ever, but I believe it's the actual source that RPGs drew on when they used that word.)

But this passage has always stuck with me. Wizard duels aren't flashy explosions of power. They're very careful maneuvering, with decades of prescience, and the winner is the one who best manages that careful maneuvering around their opponent's blind spots while creating blind spots for their opponent.

(There's a truism in D&D3.x that a level 13 wizard, with time to prepare, can kill anything that isn't preparing in return. And I feel like this story represents that concept really well, though the details are all different.)

I don't know that it was any one specific spell; at that point you have most important options unlocked. I think the big one is the Greater Teleport and Greater Scrying combo, which unlocks scry-and-die; but you also get Banishment, Simulacrum, and Limited Wish, and these all stack on top of Contingency, True Seeing, and Planar Binding, which unlock at level 11.

But scry-and-die is just very broken because D&D 3.x has a ton of powerful round/level buffs. So you can't possibly stay fully buffed as like a regular thing; but if you can dictate encounter timing you can go in fully buffed, while your opponent isn't. So you cast, like, six round/level buffs, then on round seven you cast Greater Scrying to locate your enemy; on round eight you cast Greater Teleport to show up in his room; then you have rounds eight through twelve to murder the shit out of him while he's basically unprotected, and on round thirteen you leave.

And no, in the written rules there are very few countermeasures here. A Mind Blank makes you immune to scrying, but if there's anywhere you're going to predictably be that doesn't help that much. (That said, a high-level wizard who lives alone in a wizard tower under continual mind blank is relatively safe, until you find a way to locate them.)

If you want to lock down an area, Dimensional Lock will prevent travel for one day/level, but it's an eighth-level spell and it covers a 20-foot radius. So a level 20 wizard gets six casts a day, unless they're really abusing stat bonuses in which case they get seven. If you devote all your arcane power to just casting Dimensional Lock, you can lock down 20 times seven 20-foot radii at a time; if we're generous and use the taxicab norm so this is a 40x40 square, this covers about 200k square feet, or about nine thousand squares, or a 90-square radius. And this can in fact lock down a castle pretty well, but notice this is using the entire eighth-level spell array of a 20th-level wizard, so it represents a huge investment of resources. And even then, you just have to wait for them to leave their fortress once while you're scrying them.

First off, yeah, that thread was already too long and also it was on someone's post that I'd originally misread to begin with, so let's put it here.

I really have one major response to your post, which is

what the fuck is wrong with you? Why would you ever do that? What does it mean to be immune to something mechanically but not narratively? Where do I apply to get your game design license revoked?

Like the game rules should tell me what happens if I shoot myself in the head without dodging. And they should tell me what happens when someone else shoots me in the head when I can't dodge. And those should be the same thing because it's the same action.

The version of this I've heard comes from D&D 3e: fall damage tops out at 20d6, so the maximum possible damage is 120. A typical level 11 barbarian should have 121 hit points (if not more through Con bonuses; I think they're very likely to actually have 132.) So by the rules, a full-health barbarian can reliably jump off a cliff and survive the fall.

And some people are like "yes but obviously a real human won't consistently survive a thousand-foot fall" but of course what the rules are telling you is that a level 11 barbarian is not, in fact, a normal human; they can absorb a level of punishment that no real person possibly could.

People periodically try to reinterpret hit points as, like, luck, or dodging ability, but as you say that never holds up once you start asking questions about what's going on. (The classic question is poison-on-hit attacks, but honestly the shooting someone in the head bit is also good.) In order for hit points to make sense, you kind of have to say that some people can walk off being shot in the head at point-blank range, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's just the world you're building.

(Or you can keep max hp low enough and gun damage high enough that a max roll crit will kill anyone, but that generally undermines what people want the hit points to do in other contexts. If you want people to be superhuman just let them be superhuman!)

---

For the last bit: yeah obviously you're not going to, like, make crafting rolls for everyone in the city. But if your mechanics are wildly at odds with a functioning economy you really should expect your players to (1) ask questions and (2) exploit the hell out of them.

The world has to work the way the rules say it does because otherwise what's the point of the rules and how do you know how the world works?

Before the agonism: thank you for making a new thread! I did want to natter about it, so I'm appreciative. But anyhow okay:

I want to bring up the bag of flour problem.

This sort of thing easily turns into an arms race. The GM creates new mechanics to disincentive things like the bag of flour, and the players come up with new exploits, so the GM comes up with more mechanics, and you end up with a ruleset too complex to remember. Not using the bag of flour is an agreement to not overcomplicate the rules.

Regarding the immediately preceeding post:

It's amazing to me how much of this stuff only comes up because of specific design decisions made in Dungeons and Dragons and just fully ceases to be a problem once you start playing other games with different design philosophies.

I'm not trying to clown on D&D, but this just isn't an issue in maybe, like, most RPGs released after like, 1995.

In terms of rules and simulationism (and particularly the ability of characters to divine the underlying rules) in many games I think the cause and effect is reversed.

Like, Nights Black Agents uses mook rules, where some enemies just immediately go down in one hit. I don't think that the weasely 120lb snitch goes down in one hit because he only has 1hp; rather, we use the mook rules because he's the kind of guy that the ex Navy Seal can take out in one punch or gunshot to the knee. That doesn't mean our snitch would go down if an 80 year old grandma hit him with a purse, because he's not a mook *to her*. It's not that the PC can take him down in one hit because he's a mook; rather, he's a mook because the PC can take him down in one hit.

The mook rules are a way of modeling a *particular* relationship, not a simulation modelling *all* relationships.

Again, the big reason to do this is that it saves a lot of time for the GM and game designers; trying to put together a simulation where the snitch, grandma and ex-Seal all organically have the right stats to get to the relationship we know that they "should" have is a huge pain and it's not immediately clear to me that there's any benefit.

Dungeons and Dragons, on the part of both designers and players often tends to have this conceit that the rules are a simulation; that hit points are an objective measure of an internal quality, and also that the PC classes are, like, career paths and anybody who takes those careers gets those powers.

These are actually really weird conceits!

Like, Numenera has a character class called a Nano, and that's supposed to be the in-universe name for anybody who has Wizard like powers. But the game is really clear that the list of PC Nano options are *not* a list of things that Nanos can do. Any given class ability might be as common or as rare as the GM chooses, and your PC might be the only person on earth who has a given power.

Dungeons and Dragons just dominates the scene so thoroughly that we mostly just take certain of its and its players conceits for granted, but as far as I can tell often they're actually just a thing in D&D and media which directly reference D&D.

I mean what I, personally, am doing, is actively defending those conceits.

Like, what happens if a mook attacks another mook? What if you mind control one of them? What if you bribe one of them? What if before the fight you hire an army of fifty grannies to beat up the mooks with their purses?

And in the context of games like D&D with wide power levels, you wind up with the stupid phenomenon of a level fifteen mook, who by the rules goes down to a hit from a level 1 character even though he's a fire-breathing giant. Can the same character be a mook in one scene and not-a-mook in another, and how do you tell?

A lot of the conceits of D&D seem almost necessary if you want to tell stories about worlds with (1) large power gradients (2) no explicit narrative logic and (3) open-ended problem-solving. You can't define characters or abilities by their role in the narrative, because they might have a different role in the narrative depending on what the players decide to do. And a system that says "oh you can't hire a bunch of people to come in and beat up the mooks for you because that violates the narrative constraints of the genre" just seems incredibly limiting.

---

Now to a different point a couple of people have brought up, explicitly referencing Numenara, yes you can have abilities that maybe only the PC has or whatever. So you can say "this ability breaks the economy but that's fine because no one else has it". But there are two potential problems here.

The first is, of course, that you should be totally prepared for the PC to break the economy.

The second is that if every opponent has...some abilities...but you don't have any information about what other characters can do, you're kind of running blind in every encounter. In order to understand the world you need to know what other characters are capable of, and in order to make interesting tactical choices in fights you need to have some sense of what your opponents might be able to do.

And the more you say that every ability set is unique, the more you undermine players' ability to make meaningful choices because they have no sense of how the world works or what the results of those choices will be.

So yes, you can say the PC has unique crafting abilities, or something. But you need some sense of how many people can craft, and how hard that is, and what kind of living they make, and what you'd need to do to get more/get them to stop/bribe them to screw your enemies/whatever. Otherwise you're just shooting in the dark.

reading the crafting rules in pathfinder 2e and like. yeah i realise the system is not meant to model a functioning economy with supply and demand, but since the thing it does seem meant to do is 'make sure crafting isn't more than marginally useful or it'll break the game' i resent it a little

@transunlight

at least for magic items they seem strictly worse (at least re: making sense of why anyone spends their time crafting high-level ones for resale). the ordinary crafting ones maybe are better, idk

Well yes, but they're extremely good at their design goals, which is to explain why no one spends their time crafting magic items for resale.

Fairly explicit in the rules that you can't actually buy magic items, and that crafting an item is a quest, and for the most part you're supposed to use whichever things you find.

(3E had a major change when it fairly explicitly allowed purchase of magic items, rather than explicitly forbidding it; this led to great gnashing of teeth. It was a big part of the shift to planned builds, away from most of the your character being determined semi-randomly.)

based on your tags and also the words "3E" you are talking about D&D, and for all I know what you are saying is true in early editions of D&D but this post is about pathfinder, which totally does allow you to buy magic items from merchants. said merchants must be either making them for resale themselves or buying them from someone who is.

Oh yeah, I misread you when I saw 1E, sorry; I forgot there was a pathfinder 2E.

(Pathfinder 1E is essentially D&D 3E, with minor tweaks. And I think you're right there; the rules explicitly let you buy items, and they make it predictable and straightforward to make magic items, but from my memory it's not a very reasonable income source and also you make the same income/day from low-tier items that you do from high-tier items.)

i mean trying to pretend that the mechanics are simulationist or that NPCs all function according to the same rules as PCs has always felt like catastrophically missing the point to me?

In most of the games I'm familiar with (which I know is a specific subset of ttrpgs) you're very much supposed to be treating mechanics that way.

Like "making magic items is hard by the rules, and that's why you can't buy them in shops" isn't me making an inference; I'm pretty sure that's literally what the DMG said. And simulationist verisimilitude was an explicit goal of 3e, and they did a ton of fairly impressive math work to make it work smoothly. (There's a fun essay somewhere working through how an optimized level 5 expert puts up nearly exactly world-record numbers in multiple track and field sports.)

In practice I'm not really a ttrpg person at all; but I would have absolutely zero interest in a game that didn't at least try to make the NPCs follow the same rules as the PCs. Otherwise how are you supposed to understand how the world works?

by reading worldbuilding fluff and incorporating your existing knowledge and intuitions, same as every other fantasy setting such as those in novels and video games

I think this is related to the thing where I just don't get magical realism.

But my reaction to that is, yes obviously, but my knowledge and intuitions have to be adapted to the rules of the setting: if some poeple can fly, or read minds, or reliably survive two-hundred-foot falls, or murder a thousand ordinary men with a teaspoon, then I have to use my knowledge and intuitions to think about how a world with those abilities would work.

And so I'd say the same thing about worldbuilding fluff: it's useful, but it has to be compatible with what you tell me about how things work mechanically. If powerful wizards have the ability to mind-control millions of people, then I'll ask why any nations aren't run by mind controllers; if powerful wizards have the ability to create eighteen tons of worked iron for fifty gold then I'll ask why there are any powerful wizards willing to work for cash if iron is worth money.

(Pathfinder d20 "solves" this problem by including a clause that "this iron is "not suitable for use in the creation of other objects and cannot be sold", which is the sort of thing that genuinely offends me because that's not how iron works and now I can't use my knowledge and intuitions.)

To use intuitions, to have worldbuilding, you need some sense of what people are capable of doing. And that's what the rules are there for.

I don't think the magical-realism analogy works very well here. There's an abstraction-layer you're missing, I think, of the difference between player-facing options and character-facing options, which isn't replicated in magical realism.

In magical realism—or, at least, all but the most aggressively metafictional magical realism—the thing that's happening isn't "the magic happens only in the narration, not in-universe, while in-universe events are meanwhile fully coherent and consistent-with-ordinary-human-psychology but look very different from what's narrated"; but, in many TTRPGs, that's precisely the thing going on. This varies in how overt it is, but it's in fact all over the place.

For a very overt example of this, see e.g. Gone to Hell, in which players get access to such actions as "attempt a clever solution that just makes the problem worse" and "fail to anticipate the obvious consequences". Clearly, this isn't the player character choosing to do these things; rather, it's the player choosing for the player character to do these things, causing the player character, in-story, to do them unintentionally while attempting to do other things. There's going to be a coherent in-universe account of why the PC attempted their clever solution, and of why it ended up backfiring; that account isn't going to look at all like "they decided to take the action of 'attempt a clever solution that just makes the problem worse'".

For a less overt example, meanwhile, I'd point you in directions like the D&D 3.5 / Pathfinder 1 barbarian's Rage ability, whose initiation is entirely under player control, even as in-universe the thing it represents is typically a much less controlled sort of rage; it would be a decidedly unconventional flavoring for barbarians, for them to be people of very exceptionally strong mental self-control who deliberately choose to enter the enraged mental state for precisely only those moments when their doing so appears tactically-ideal in combat, even as that's precisely what their player is likely to be doing most of the time. And, much like the Gone to Hell case, this is implicitly justified by in-universe causal pathways different from the player-facing ones, with in-universe events happening to push the character into / out of the relevant psychological state with timing concurrent to when the player chooses to enter / exit the relevant game-mechanical state.

The thing rules like the ones in these two examples are doing, then, isn't describing what options the player characters are choosing to take. Rather, what they're doing is offering the players levers of influence over the direction in which the player characters' story goes. Unlike in magical realism, when you look underneath, there's still room for a fully consistent causal story about what happened in-universe, much as a well-told (non-magical-realism) fantasy novel will typically have a causal story about why in-universe goings-on are going on beyond "the author decided to have these things happen".

And then, once you have rules like that, it's easy to see how worldbuilding comes in as a thing that can exist separately from, but coexist with, them: the worldbuilding defines what the in-universe causal pathways are by which the player-selected outcomes end up taking place. The player chooses to have their character fail to anticipate an obvious consequence to an action; the worldbuilding supplies the background-information that cognition-impairing magic exists and could have been cast on the player's character in such a way as to cause that failure-of-anticipation.

(The thing with the iron, I agree, is silly, and I will make no attempt to defend that one. That's a case where multiple systems which are trying to describe principles of how things work in-universe are in conflict with one another around the edges, without any of the involved systems being of the purely-player-facing variety.)

See, I think some of that is exactly what I meant by drawing the magical realism comparison. In the mechanisms you describe, things are happening for narrative-logic reasons rather than diegetic reasons, which is the same thing I'm objecting to in magical realism.

Like, in your Gone to Hell examples, it seems like the reason your solution makes the problem worse is that narrative fiat says it makes the problem worse, because you took the narrative action "try to help and make the problem worse". I do take your point that you're then narrating in-universe reasons that works, but that's sort of fundamentally unsastifying to me.

(This does overlap with my distaste for narrative games in general, and honestly my discomfort with roleplaying; I'm me, and I'm going to take the actions that I think best achieve my goals. "Try to help and make the situation worse by accident" is not going to achieve my goals so it's not an action I would choose to take.)

In contrast, your barbarian example I think precisely carves out where we differ: I feel like you have to interpret Barbarian Rage as a conscious choice that barbarian characters are making, because that's what the rules give you and the world functions according to rules where barbarians choose to rage or not for tactical reasons. Now you could always choose to roleplay a character who rages at inadvisable times, but the rules to me are very clearly spelling out barbarians who choose to rage on purpose.

To try to focus in a bit on some of my real issue here: in the (very good) webnovel Practical Guide to Evil, there are narrative causal pathways where things are actually more likely to happen when they advance a character's story, or something like that. And the characters in the world know that and they exploit it to make predictions and build their tactics; they say things like "Ah yes, but this is the beat in the story where the villain gets beaten but escapes and lives to fight another day" and then they rely on that to plan their next move because it's a reliable part of the universe's physics.

If your rules cause things to happen for narrative reasons, you live in a universe that has narrative causality. And in that case it's irrational, and a little bit insane, to not incorporate that narrative causality itself into your model of the world and let it influence your next decisions.

I think some important piece of my disconnect from you, here, is that I don't understand why you're analogizing TTRPGs with player-facing rules which shape events in accordance with narrative causality to APGTE—where narrative causality is an in-universe phenomenon—as opposed to analogizing them to more ordinary fantasy novels like, to pick an example I'm pretty sure we've both read, the Stormlight Archive.

It is not the case, on Roshar, that the world runs according to narrative causality. That's not part of the setting. This is true irrespective of the fact that the stories of Roshar to which we have access have been written by Brandon Sanderson and thus are in fact shaped in accordance with narrative causality. It isn't insane for the characters on Roshar to refrain from thinking about their lives in narrative terms; by the rules of their universe, this would not produce good predictions most of the time, even if it's the case for us as readers that making predictions based on narrative causality can be effective when reading novels set on Roshar.

As far as I can tell, the sorts of tabletop RPGs where the game rules don't represent the in-universe rules are pretty directly analogous to that, most of the time. I'm sure there are some which are more APGTE-like, where player-facing narrative-outcome-selection is an in-universe phenomenon; but that's nondefault. It seems to me that it's about as much of a misinterpretation of most games-with-rules-that-aren't-strictly-modeling-in-universe-causality to claim that their rules imply that their worlds run on narrative causality as an in-universe phenomenon as it would be a misinterpretation of Brandon Sanderson's novels to say that their worlds run on narrative causality as an in-universe phenomenon. (Which most of them don't! Perfect State is an outlier.)

I think I'm claiming that if the rules encode narrative causality then the world-as-the-player-experiences it kind of has to have narrative causality. From the perspective of the player character, you can in fact make better predictions and decisions if you take into account the structure of the player-facing narrative-outcome-selection.

And the only reasonable response for those characters to make is to, like, try-to-help-but-make-things-worse at the villain whom they want to fail, or something like that.

And I realize that I'm fighting the system here, in that some of these narrative games are asking you to take the role of the author rather than the character in some sense. But even if I buy that, I feel like the character should be taking the role of the character, and if the rules cause things to happen for narrative reasons then the character is living in a world where things sometimes happen for narrative reasons, and this seems like something they should be able to figure out and exploit that.

And I guess your point is, in most novels the characters live in worlds where things happen for narrative reasons and they don't take that into account. But honestly I think in most of the fiction I read they do, but only a little; they go on and on about the prophecy or the will of fate or the way things are meant to fall out or whatever. Knights Radiant get an explicit powerup in the scene where they come to climaxes in their character arcs! (see also "The Well-Tempered Plot Device".)

But there's also definitely an element of, if I'm playing a character, I want to inhabit the character, and make good decisions that will make them happy.

reading the crafting rules in pathfinder 2e and like. yeah i realise the system is not meant to model a functioning economy with supply and demand, but since the thing it does seem meant to do is 'make sure crafting isn't more than marginally useful or it'll break the game' i resent it a little

@transunlight

at least for magic items they seem strictly worse (at least re: making sense of why anyone spends their time crafting high-level ones for resale). the ordinary crafting ones maybe are better, idk

Well yes, but they're extremely good at their design goals, which is to explain why no one spends their time crafting magic items for resale.

Fairly explicit in the rules that you can't actually buy magic items, and that crafting an item is a quest, and for the most part you're supposed to use whichever things you find.

(3E had a major change when it fairly explicitly allowed purchase of magic items, rather than explicitly forbidding it; this led to great gnashing of teeth. It was a big part of the shift to planned builds, away from most of the your character being determined semi-randomly.)

based on your tags and also the words "3E" you are talking about D&D, and for all I know what you are saying is true in early editions of D&D but this post is about pathfinder, which totally does allow you to buy magic items from merchants. said merchants must be either making them for resale themselves or buying them from someone who is.

Oh yeah, I misread you when I saw 1E, sorry; I forgot there was a pathfinder 2E.

(Pathfinder 1E is essentially D&D 3E, with minor tweaks. And I think you're right there; the rules explicitly let you buy items, and they make it predictable and straightforward to make magic items, but from my memory it's not a very reasonable income source and also you make the same income/day from low-tier items that you do from high-tier items.)

i mean trying to pretend that the mechanics are simulationist or that NPCs all function according to the same rules as PCs has always felt like catastrophically missing the point to me?

In most of the games I'm familiar with (which I know is a specific subset of ttrpgs) you're very much supposed to be treating mechanics that way.

Like "making magic items is hard by the rules, and that's why you can't buy them in shops" isn't me making an inference; I'm pretty sure that's literally what the DMG said. And simulationist verisimilitude was an explicit goal of 3e, and they did a ton of fairly impressive math work to make it work smoothly. (There's a fun essay somewhere working through how an optimized level 5 expert puts up nearly exactly world-record numbers in multiple track and field sports.)

In practice I'm not really a ttrpg person at all; but I would have absolutely zero interest in a game that didn't at least try to make the NPCs follow the same rules as the PCs. Otherwise how are you supposed to understand how the world works?

by reading worldbuilding fluff and incorporating your existing knowledge and intuitions, same as every other fantasy setting such as those in novels and video games

I think this is related to the thing where I just don't get magical realism.

But my reaction to that is, yes obviously, but my knowledge and intuitions have to be adapted to the rules of the setting: if some poeple can fly, or read minds, or reliably survive two-hundred-foot falls, or murder a thousand ordinary men with a teaspoon, then I have to use my knowledge and intuitions to think about how a world with those abilities would work.

And so I'd say the same thing about worldbuilding fluff: it's useful, but it has to be compatible with what you tell me about how things work mechanically. If powerful wizards have the ability to mind-control millions of people, then I'll ask why any nations aren't run by mind controllers; if powerful wizards have the ability to create eighteen tons of worked iron for fifty gold then I'll ask why there are any powerful wizards willing to work for cash if iron is worth money.

(Pathfinder d20 "solves" this problem by including a clause that "this iron is "not suitable for use in the creation of other objects and cannot be sold", which is the sort of thing that genuinely offends me because that's not how iron works and now I can't use my knowledge and intuitions.)

To use intuitions, to have worldbuilding, you need some sense of what people are capable of doing. And that's what the rules are there for.

I don't think the magical-realism analogy works very well here. There's an abstraction-layer you're missing, I think, of the difference between player-facing options and character-facing options, which isn't replicated in magical realism.

In magical realism—or, at least, all but the most aggressively metafictional magical realism—the thing that's happening isn't "the magic happens only in the narration, not in-universe, while in-universe events are meanwhile fully coherent and consistent-with-ordinary-human-psychology but look very different from what's narrated"; but, in many TTRPGs, that's precisely the thing going on. This varies in how overt it is, but it's in fact all over the place.

For a very overt example of this, see e.g. Gone to Hell, in which players get access to such actions as "attempt a clever solution that just makes the problem worse" and "fail to anticipate the obvious consequences". Clearly, this isn't the player character choosing to do these things; rather, it's the player choosing for the player character to do these things, causing the player character, in-story, to do them unintentionally while attempting to do other things. There's going to be a coherent in-universe account of why the PC attempted their clever solution, and of why it ended up backfiring; that account isn't going to look at all like "they decided to take the action of 'attempt a clever solution that just makes the problem worse'".

For a less overt example, meanwhile, I'd point you in directions like the D&D 3.5 / Pathfinder 1 barbarian's Rage ability, whose initiation is entirely under player control, even as in-universe the thing it represents is typically a much less controlled sort of rage; it would be a decidedly unconventional flavoring for barbarians, for them to be people of very exceptionally strong mental self-control who deliberately choose to enter the enraged mental state for precisely only those moments when their doing so appears tactically-ideal in combat, even as that's precisely what their player is likely to be doing most of the time. And, much like the Gone to Hell case, this is implicitly justified by in-universe causal pathways different from the player-facing ones, with in-universe events happening to push the character into / out of the relevant psychological state with timing concurrent to when the player chooses to enter / exit the relevant game-mechanical state.

The thing rules like the ones in these two examples are doing, then, isn't describing what options the player characters are choosing to take. Rather, what they're doing is offering the players levers of influence over the direction in which the player characters' story goes. Unlike in magical realism, when you look underneath, there's still room for a fully consistent causal story about what happened in-universe, much as a well-told (non-magical-realism) fantasy novel will typically have a causal story about why in-universe goings-on are going on beyond "the author decided to have these things happen".

And then, once you have rules like that, it's easy to see how worldbuilding comes in as a thing that can exist separately from, but coexist with, them: the worldbuilding defines what the in-universe causal pathways are by which the player-selected outcomes end up taking place. The player chooses to have their character fail to anticipate an obvious consequence to an action; the worldbuilding supplies the background-information that cognition-impairing magic exists and could have been cast on the player's character in such a way as to cause that failure-of-anticipation.

(The thing with the iron, I agree, is silly, and I will make no attempt to defend that one. That's a case where multiple systems which are trying to describe principles of how things work in-universe are in conflict with one another around the edges, without any of the involved systems being of the purely-player-facing variety.)

See, I think some of that is exactly what I meant by drawing the magical realism comparison. In the mechanisms you describe, things are happening for narrative-logic reasons rather than diegetic reasons, which is the same thing I'm objecting to in magical realism.

Like, in your Gone to Hell examples, it seems like the reason your solution makes the problem worse is that narrative fiat says it makes the problem worse, because you took the narrative action "try to help and make the problem worse". I do take your point that you're then narrating in-universe reasons that works, but that's sort of fundamentally unsastifying to me.

(This does overlap with my distaste for narrative games in general, and honestly my discomfort with roleplaying; I'm me, and I'm going to take the actions that I think best achieve my goals. "Try to help and make the situation worse by accident" is not going to achieve my goals so it's not an action I would choose to take.)

In contrast, your barbarian example I think precisely carves out where we differ: I feel like you have to interpret Barbarian Rage as a conscious choice that barbarian characters are making, because that's what the rules give you and the world functions according to rules where barbarians choose to rage or not for tactical reasons. Now you could always choose to roleplay a character who rages at inadvisable times, but the rules to me are very clearly spelling out barbarians who choose to rage on purpose.

To try to focus in a bit on some of my real issue here: in the (very good) webnovel Practical Guide to Evil, there are narrative causal pathways where things are actually more likely to happen when they advance a character's story, or something like that. And the characters in the world know that and they exploit it to make predictions and build their tactics; they say things like "Ah yes, but this is the beat in the story where the villain gets beaten but escapes and lives to fight another day" and then they rely on that to plan their next move because it's a reliable part of the universe's physics.

If your rules cause things to happen for narrative reasons, you live in a universe that has narrative causality. And in that case it's irrational, and a little bit insane, to not incorporate that narrative causality itself into your model of the world and let it influence your next decisions.

reading the crafting rules in pathfinder 2e and like. yeah i realise the system is not meant to model a functioning economy with supply and demand, but since the thing it does seem meant to do is 'make sure crafting isn't more than marginally useful or it'll break the game' i resent it a little

@transunlight

at least for magic items they seem strictly worse (at least re: making sense of why anyone spends their time crafting high-level ones for resale). the ordinary crafting ones maybe are better, idk

Well yes, but they're extremely good at their design goals, which is to explain why no one spends their time crafting magic items for resale.

Fairly explicit in the rules that you can't actually buy magic items, and that crafting an item is a quest, and for the most part you're supposed to use whichever things you find.

(3E had a major change when it fairly explicitly allowed purchase of magic items, rather than explicitly forbidding it; this led to great gnashing of teeth. It was a big part of the shift to planned builds, away from most of the your character being determined semi-randomly.)

based on your tags and also the words "3E" you are talking about D&D, and for all I know what you are saying is true in early editions of D&D but this post is about pathfinder, which totally does allow you to buy magic items from merchants. said merchants must be either making them for resale themselves or buying them from someone who is.

Oh yeah, I misread you when I saw 1E, sorry; I forgot there was a pathfinder 2E.

(Pathfinder 1E is essentially D&D 3E, with minor tweaks. And I think you're right there; the rules explicitly let you buy items, and they make it predictable and straightforward to make magic items, but from my memory it's not a very reasonable income source and also you make the same income/day from low-tier items that you do from high-tier items.)

i mean trying to pretend that the mechanics are simulationist or that NPCs all function according to the same rules as PCs has always felt like catastrophically missing the point to me?

In most of the games I'm familiar with (which I know is a specific subset of ttrpgs) you're very much supposed to be treating mechanics that way.

Like "making magic items is hard by the rules, and that's why you can't buy them in shops" isn't me making an inference; I'm pretty sure that's literally what the DMG said. And simulationist verisimilitude was an explicit goal of 3e, and they did a ton of fairly impressive math work to make it work smoothly. (There's a fun essay somewhere working through how an optimized level 5 expert puts up nearly exactly world-record numbers in multiple track and field sports.)

In practice I'm not really a ttrpg person at all; but I would have absolutely zero interest in a game that didn't at least try to make the NPCs follow the same rules as the PCs. Otherwise how are you supposed to understand how the world works?

by reading worldbuilding fluff and incorporating your existing knowledge and intuitions, same as every other fantasy setting such as those in novels and video games

I think this is related to the thing where I just don't get magical realism.

But my reaction to that is, yes obviously, but my knowledge and intuitions have to be adapted to the rules of the setting: if some poeple can fly, or read minds, or reliably survive two-hundred-foot falls, or murder a thousand ordinary men with a teaspoon, then I have to use my knowledge and intuitions to think about how a world with those abilities would work.

And so I'd say the same thing about worldbuilding fluff: it's useful, but it has to be compatible with what you tell me about how things work mechanically. If powerful wizards have the ability to mind-control millions of people, then I'll ask why any nations aren't run by mind controllers; if powerful wizards have the ability to create eighteen tons of worked iron for fifty gold then I'll ask why there are any powerful wizards willing to work for cash if iron is worth money.

(Pathfinder d20 "solves" this problem by including a clause that "this iron is "not suitable for use in the creation of other objects and cannot be sold", which is the sort of thing that genuinely offends me because that's not how iron works and now I can't use my knowledge and intuitions.)

To use intuitions, to have worldbuilding, you need some sense of what people are capable of doing. And that's what the rules are there for.

reading the crafting rules in pathfinder 2e and like. yeah i realise the system is not meant to model a functioning economy with supply and demand, but since the thing it does seem meant to do is 'make sure crafting isn't more than marginally useful or it'll break the game' i resent it a little

@transunlight

at least for magic items they seem strictly worse (at least re: making sense of why anyone spends their time crafting high-level ones for resale). the ordinary crafting ones maybe are better, idk

Well yes, but they're extremely good at their design goals, which is to explain why no one spends their time crafting magic items for resale.

Fairly explicit in the rules that you can't actually buy magic items, and that crafting an item is a quest, and for the most part you're supposed to use whichever things you find.

(3E had a major change when it fairly explicitly allowed purchase of magic items, rather than explicitly forbidding it; this led to great gnashing of teeth. It was a big part of the shift to planned builds, away from most of the your character being determined semi-randomly.)

based on your tags and also the words "3E" you are talking about D&D, and for all I know what you are saying is true in early editions of D&D but this post is about pathfinder, which totally does allow you to buy magic items from merchants. said merchants must be either making them for resale themselves or buying them from someone who is.

Oh yeah, I misread you when I saw 1E, sorry; I forgot there was a pathfinder 2E.

(Pathfinder 1E is essentially D&D 3E, with minor tweaks. And I think you're right there; the rules explicitly let you buy items, and they make it predictable and straightforward to make magic items, but from my memory it's not a very reasonable income source and also you make the same income/day from low-tier items that you do from high-tier items.)

i mean trying to pretend that the mechanics are simulationist or that NPCs all function according to the same rules as PCs has always felt like catastrophically missing the point to me?

In most of the games I'm familiar with (which I know is a specific subset of ttrpgs) you're very much supposed to be treating mechanics that way.

Like "making magic items is hard by the rules, and that's why you can't buy them in shops" isn't me making an inference; I'm pretty sure that's literally what the DMG said. And simulationist verisimilitude was an explicit goal of 3e, and they did a ton of fairly impressive math work to make it work smoothly. (There's a fun essay somewhere working through how an optimized level 5 expert puts up nearly exactly world-record numbers in multiple track and field sports.)

In practice I'm not really a ttrpg person at all; but I would have absolutely zero interest in a game that didn't at least try to make the NPCs follow the same rules as the PCs. Otherwise how are you supposed to understand how the world works?

reading the crafting rules in pathfinder 2e and like. yeah i realise the system is not meant to model a functioning economy with supply and demand, but since the thing it does seem meant to do is 'make sure crafting isn't more than marginally useful or it'll break the game' i resent it a little

@transunlight

at least for magic items they seem strictly worse (at least re: making sense of why anyone spends their time crafting high-level ones for resale). the ordinary crafting ones maybe are better, idk

Well yes, but they're extremely good at their design goals, which is to explain why no one spends their time crafting magic items for resale.

Fairly explicit in the rules that you can't actually buy magic items, and that crafting an item is a quest, and for the most part you're supposed to use whichever things you find.

(3E had a major change when it fairly explicitly allowed purchase of magic items, rather than explicitly forbidding it; this led to great gnashing of teeth. It was a big part of the shift to planned builds, away from most of the your character being determined semi-randomly.)

based on your tags and also the words "3E" you are talking about D&D, and for all I know what you are saying is true in early editions of D&D but this post is about pathfinder, which totally does allow you to buy magic items from merchants. said merchants must be either making them for resale themselves or buying them from someone who is.

Oh yeah, I misread you when I saw 1E, sorry; I forgot there was a pathfinder 2E.

(Pathfinder 1E is essentially D&D 3E, with minor tweaks. And I think you're right there; the rules explicitly let you buy items, and they make it predictable and straightforward to make magic items, but from my memory it's not a very reasonable income source and also you make the same income/day from low-tier items that you do from high-tier items.)

reading the crafting rules in pathfinder 2e and like. yeah i realise the system is not meant to model a functioning economy with supply and demand, but since the thing it does seem meant to do is 'make sure crafting isn't more than marginally useful or it'll break the game' i resent it a little

@transunlight

at least for magic items they seem strictly worse (at least re: making sense of why anyone spends their time crafting high-level ones for resale). the ordinary crafting ones maybe are better, idk

Well yes, but they're extremely good at their design goals, which is to explain why no one spends their time crafting magic items for resale.

Fairly explicit in the rules that you can't actually buy magic items, and that crafting an item is a quest, and for the most part you're supposed to use whichever things you find.

(3E had a major change when it fairly explicitly allowed purchase of magic items, rather than explicitly forbidding it; this led to great gnashing of teeth. It was a big part of the shift to planned builds, away from most of the your character being determined semi-randomly.)

Bad news, Wizards of the Coast just rejected my new slogan for Magic: the Gathering, “It’s Kind Of Like Dungeons & Dragons I Think??? But With The Fun Characters And Stories Replaced By Even More Statistics??”

And I thought it was a surefire winner. :-(

(source)

Today I introduced the fiance to the D&D random harlot table

ghostpalmtechnique

It's from the first edition D&D Dungeon Master's guide, which was published in 1979, so it predated that by quite a ways.

Oh please post a link to the dnd random harlots table