Our expedition had found a valuable, golden staff, once the property of a powerful hag, or maybe just a sorceress. We wanted a curse she had laid on a noble house and swamp to be gone. It had done its job. The house had been ruined for however long. (The adventure module is the one with the zombraire wizard, Dragonsfoot or Basic fantasy stuff. I fail to remember the name of it. Nothing special, but completely usable.)
The hag is not pleased as we try to bargain the staff in exchange for her lifting the curse. We manage to get out of there without any excess curses, but still, this was clearly a mistake on our side. We should have either taken the stave and kept it to ourselves, or otherwise given it to the hag as a gift.
Now, much later, and with a very different set of players, I am refereeing Langskip på ville veier, https://pellep.itch.io/langskip. The adventure is written with a very light dice rolling rules and little player-facing besides, but the procedures are more or less known from the currently fashionable abbreviation (choose at least one from OSR, NSR, FKR) and the premise is that a giant magpie has stolen a viking king’s favourite longship and the king wants it back. We are playing it with Coup de Greyhawk rules and have set the adventure nominally in the pseudo-Scandinavia of Flanaess. Thrillonria or something like that.
After wandering around, and then finding a local seiðrmaðr and a player character wizard enjoying some fleinsopp under his guidance, it is now known that the magpie is capricious, does not care about people, but at least entertains the thought of getting something interesting in exchange for the longship. The next session is likely to consist of the players figuring out what this something might be and how to make the trade with a magpie huge enough to carry a longship. It also killed their guide earlier in the wilderness, after playing with the guide, or maybe messing with them, or who knows what it was thinking. It is like an utterly terrifying tyrannosaurus that can also fly. And is clever, too.
A doctrinal question I see here is the one in the title – should the characters try to trade with the magpie, in the sense of having something it wants and trying to keep it inaccessible in some sense and insisting on the longship to be brought in, or should they just give the gift and ask nicely? There are lots of other details here, and the question of how to deal with a gigantic and uncaring creature is really an interesting one in and of itself. Another approach, seemingly ignored by the players, might have been to create some kind of animal cult deal here, or to get the magpie as a mount, or…
My heuristic at the moment is that one can trade with peers in a culture that acknowledges trades, but against more powerful entities, or entities for whom trade is not a socially enforced convention, maybe going for the gifting approach is better. Trying to make sure a trade happens shows unreliability and makes subverting the trade by force or trickery a very tempting move, for would they not perceive any precautions as attempts at subversion?
The precise player maneuvers and dice rolls will determine how the magpie case turns out, but this general idea of having doctrine for these kinds of potentially transactional social situations is interesting. Kinda similar to a dungeoneering doctrine of going fast or slow, but for persuasion, not dungeoneering.
My goal here is to share this observation. Any similar findings or sharpening of the doctrine is most welcome.
11 responses to “Trade or gift?”
In my experience play does not have a great deal of fidelity when it comes to working with NPCs. It devolves into tropes where player and GM cannot trust one another. Either the “monster” will betray the characters or vice versa. In that kind of cynical paradigm, the idea of gifting and seduction as a means to an end is not really an option.
But all options should be on the table.
We have had what I would say as successful social play, so I am interested in how to go further from there.
You’ve already laid out a reasonable heuristic and a likely disadvantage of trading with someone on another level.
So offering a trade, your chances might look like this:
1-2: Seemingly accepted, but you will be betrayed
3: Refused
4-6: Accepted (provided you do have something interesting)
By contrast, giving a gift might look like this:
1: Accepted, but you will be betrayed, too
2-4: Accepted, but no longship is forthcoming.
5-6: Accepted and you get that longship.
I expect you to have this well in hand, most likely thought out a lot better.
I’m just pulling numbers out of my ass here and not trying for symmetry. The numbers should be adjusted according to exact circumstances and dice rolls, of course. That said, I admit to a temptation to make both options ‘interesting’ (i.e. trading having a higher risk of an extremely dangerious betrayal vs. gifting having a higher chance of ending up empty-handed).
I personally lean towards communicating the party’s chances and briefly explaining my reasoning.
(Personally, I’d then use a dice cup to roll, spying on the result and unveiling it after the deal has gone down. But that’s just my recovering illusionist self, obsessed with transparency & accountability.)
The trade ended up successful.
I gave the following chances for the magpie to bring back the ship:
1/6 if doing a trade
2/6 in case of gifts and then trade
3/6 in case of giving a gift and asking
(The 3/6 is maybe a bit generous, but the magpie is a curious creature and there was prior positive interaction, including priming it to consider a trade as a possibility. And, fundamentally, it does not really care about people one way or another, so it might as well humour them to see what happens, as well as not do that.)
The characters had a bird expert bolstered by magic and the player rolled well, so they had a big bunch of bonus dice on their 2/6 check, which ended up working well for them.
The player reasoning was that if the magpie did not bring the ship or just forgot the whole deal, they would still have the gift there as leverage.
The big risk was that the magpie could have gotten angry at the keep-away gift and delivered the ship from high altitude and with high speed. The risk did not materialize this time.
Pardon me for reading into your post probably too much, Tommi, but it seems to me that part of the difficulty here results from thinking too much in terms of outcomes.
That is, “what are the ways the characters could get the ship/the ways they could not?”
As opposed to the question of what does this bird want, and what is it about to do?
In any case, I think you modeled an answer of sorts to that last question with your percentage chances as mentioned in the reply to Johann.
Hans, you are, at least, reading the situation differently than I am. I do not see any problem.
The referee was, in both cases, doing what they should – modelling the world and consequences of character actions, neutrally in the sense of not trying to make things work for or against the player characters. The players were doing their best to have their characters succeed. That the players made a wrong move in the hag situation is a thing that happens, not a problem. The moves in the magpie situation turned out to be right, as the characters succeeded.
As a community of play we are also doing pretty fine, I would say, as we are learning things about the game and developing doctrine. I doubt it would have occurred me to formulate this difference between gift and trade as approaches, and have the ideas about when this is suitable or not, without having played/refereed these games.
I took a few days to think this over.
Tommi: I think Hans’s point is valuable. He has misunderstood nothing. He did not state or imply any problems in play, breakdowns of play, or confusions. He unfortunately used the term “difficulty,” which refers only to the fact that you raised the topic as something to solve or understand – which you in fact did – not as a criticism at the level you’re reacting to.
This post provides the foundation of his point: In/Over
If you want to address Hans’ point, then consider whether you, as GM, are doing absolutely anything at all during play except rolling dice, which the players might as well be rolling for themselves, using tables. Because it doesn’t look like you are. Or also, whether you are hovering above play to generate the tables, perhaps as an attempt to “not be actually there.” It’s as if the concept of a human GM who gets to participate (to play) via their own bounded set of authorities is off-limits. If they can’t be entirely removed, they can at least be one-step-removed by a web of procedure.
I’m familiar with this construct. It’s an ideal: to make things work out, in other words, to assure that outcomes are all right so that play continues in an appropriate fashion. However, it’s a broken concept because it presumes the act of play itself is already broken, so must require a big fix. Therefore, no one will argue, no one will accuse anyone of unfairness, no one will be held to account for anything human they actually stated into play, because it wasn’t “me,” it was the automatic buttons that were pushed and the dials that were spun. This is deluded and at best naïve. “Me” is exactly the person who is now controlling play by managing all the tables toward a specific end-state of permitted content, which is the exact opposite of the claim that they are being impartial.
That’s what Hans is talking about, and I think you should pay it serious attention.
Hi Ron,
Ok, fundamentals of the game master role. Historically a conversation that has not been very fruitful, but maybe this time.
I wrote the post with the doctrine as the main focus, which does focus on outcomes, but the tactic one chooses is based on reading the situation and motivations of others.
But I can write something about what I did as the referee in the magpie case (Eero was the referee in the hag and golden staff case) and I can write about the role of randomness. I will not do it right away and will probably start a new comment thread here. This is all conditional on my life situation.
Understood! And thanks.
Okay, so GM role and authorities.
GM has authority over which scenarios they offer to the players. In this case we had a few potential games masters offer a bunch of stuff and the Langskip was what the players chose.
Players have the right to compose their forces (choose which character from their stable they are playing or make a new one, plus gather information and hire folk to the extent their characters can). They also have the right to (attempt to) retreat at any point, which does not show disapproval of the scenario, but is rather a matter of risk-reward analysis or maybe just wanting to play something else for a while.
The adventure is roughly a two-pages, A5 size, so it is very sketchy. As the game master I had decided some elaborations on it, but mostly I did this on the fly, after we had already begun, and I had put on the referee hat.
Then my task is to
(1) keep track of the game state, and in particular the secret information
(2) interpret what happens in the game world, as a result of player character actions and otherwise; this includes making rulings
(3) as a special case of that, play non-player characters (though retainers and hirelings are often taken care of the by the players mostly)
(4) extrapolate what there is in the game world as it becomes relevant
In the case of the magpie, the adventure text is quite silent on its motivations and personality. I drew from folklore (of magpies stealing stuff, especially shiny stuff), Jurassic park, idea read online online about people being to Cthulhu/elder gods as ants doing strange rituals would be to people, and maybe even from some insight into bird intelligence and curiosity.
This is a creative act and certainly within my mandate as a referee.
The outcome is, to me, obvious: a curious creature, had taken the ship because it was strange and why not, does not care about people in general and sees itself (rightfully) as far better than them, is smart enough to understand flattery and the concept of exchange. Like shiny things, would like a mate, likes food, likes good material for building its nest.
Now, the players had done their maneuvers and called the magpie. They first offered gifts and then revealed a magically shiny discoball-like thing of fair size, which was placed in a cave the magpie could not fit into.
My task as the referee is to take the fictional situation, including what I know about the magpie’s personality, and decide what it does. Typically this is done in terms of probabilities and there are various heuristics for this; here, I ended up with 2/6 base chance that it does carry out the exchange. This is mathematical modelling – take a situation in the (fictional) world, give a mathematical representation of it, resolve stuff in the representation, translate it back into the game world. (The part of the modelling cycle where the results are evaluated typically happens between sessions.)
The modelling work does require a person, as does choosing when to engage in it. Having a referee do it allows taking hidden information into account and makes playing out social stuff and information gathering meaningful and possible.
The referee has the authority to make these modelling choices. The practice is more complicated, of course, and there are nuances here, like players being responsible for and having the authority to figure out and take care of their character’s skills and encumbrance, to the detail level and by the means they wish to, and often some player suggesting how something is modelled and the referee using that. These aside, the referee has the authority for modelling stuff.
I use a probability, as I do not see either outcome being obvious, in this case. They have the benefit of also adding to the friction of war – everything is hard, the best plans might fail, and desperate hail marys occasionally succeed. Here the players had done a bunch of preparations and rolled well, which gave them bonus dice to the roll. I do not remember the exact numbers, but the chance of failure in the final cast ended up being at most 1/10, maybe around as small as 1/30. In any case, this was a real failure chance.
I find that similar games where ideas are judged either as good (automatic success) or bad (roll a die), very dubious ideas go through, and the game is much more about persuading the game master that your idea is good.
I am uncertain if this answers your concerns, Hans and Ron.
Regarding myself, I have no concerns. I’ve said what your account looks like to me, and there’s no need for anyone to convince anyone of anything.
I agree with you about the broken context of “convince the GM so you don’t have to roll.” I’m rather committed to the idea that a given role-playing system has procedures in place which we can rely upon being used, given their criteria.
The only topic at hand – for clarity’s sake, not for argument, and I am not interested in receiving an answer – is whether your criteria for rolling dice are solid and easy to understand, or some kind of steering or stabilizing device toward an aesthetic end, or specific outcome. Again, please do not reply. I’m not harboring a secret certainty, and you can decide for yourself. This is not an attack which requires a defense. It’s a statement about the play principles which have been brought up.