1d20 wizardly afflictions

In the vein of 1d20 spells from a cursed spellbook, here's 

1d20 wizardly afflictions

Art by Perplexing Ruins

1. Localised portent. The patient's viscera rearranges into meaningful forms. Small objects nearby may transform into birds or comets.
2. Mano-a-manomania. An uncontrollable obsession with magical duels. Treatable with high dosage antimagic.
3. Sympathetic polymorph. The patient reflexively takes on the forms they magically impose on others.
4. Partial possession. Intermittently under the control of imps or quasi-elemental spirits. Contagious.
5. Cetaceanthropy. Transmitted by bite (usually a disease of krill). The patient swims amok on the night of the full moon.
6. Antimitosis. Sometimes called 'void disease'. Incurable reverse aging accompanied by disintegration of bodily tissues.
7. Clone narcissism. Obsession with the perfection of one's own form, growing in a vat.
8. St Belthin's Fever. Infection occurs during thunderstorms. Symptoms include glowing eyes, shivers, electrical discharge.
9. Intestinal bookworms. Ubiquitous parasitic reminder about proper hand hygiene while reading mouldering tomes.
10. Persistent featherweight. A lingering spell reduces the patient's mass. Prolonged affliction causes brittle bones and muscle atrophy.
11. Psychic papercut. Stinging pain in the mind brought on by telepathically reading recklessly fast.
12. Orb-gazer's wrist. Strain caused by the weight of an overheavy head resting chin-on-upturned-palm.
13. Oak gall stones. A solstice-time disease, thought to be caused by mishandling of galls during preparation of magical inks.
14. Chronic hubris. Pathological egotism characterised by challenges offered against the gods. However, see also early onset apotheosis for differential diagnosis.
15. Transitive curse. A tomb-hex heritable from mentors, yes-men, and ideological allies.
16. Wand splinter. Burrows deeper to get away from any tweezers not made of meteorite iron.
17. Petridermis. Overuse of protective spells leads to gradual stoneification of the patient's skin. Very bad for the pores.
18. Prophetic bones. Generally benign. Affected bones have a telltale ache on planes where the concept of weather does not exist.
19. Component magnetism. A lingering magnetic attraction to moss, sulfur, dried spiders, guano, and so on. Brought on by reckless overreliance on telekinesis.
20. Early onset apotheosis. A traumatic rupture in the godhead leads to total or partial deification.

I had been thinking about Discworld's magical afflictions (like 'planets'), and that made me wonder what sort of bedevilments the Thirty Wicked Wizards would suffer from.

 

For more build-your-own wizardly fever-dream content, check out my zine, Wiki Articles Are Wizards [citation needed].

When player agency meets character compulsions

When you're playing a role, sometimes your character ought to act in some way.

• The goodly hero has a moral code regarding the treatment of prisoners
• The addicted wizard would do anything to get more purple poppy
• The impulsive barbarian wants to destroy doors, spines, and magic items
• The traditionalist dwarf can't rein in her hatred of goblins or desire for gold
• The life priest's role demands self-sacrifice if it comes down to it
• The emergency medic has a duty of care to her patients
• The brash brute can't keep his foot out of his mouth

These traits create roleplaying obligations. The obligation is on the player, constraining their choice down to how their character "should act".

It often happens that a character who acts on an obligation risks getting a negative outcome – perhaps even a catastrophic one. And this may be obvious to the player. So it's natural that players won't always want to have their character act as they "ought" to.

An aside: I'm talking about classic roleplaying games here, where character success amounts to player success. In storytelling games, or even in RPGs played as if they were storytelling games, players tend to be much more open to making deliberately "suboptimal" in-character choices.

At the game table, whose job is it to ensure that obligations are followed through? The rules? The GM? The social dynamics of the group?

The strength of an obligation – how much a player "should" follow it – varies depending on the character, player, group, and game system. For example, in a point buy system where a burdensome personality trait compensates you with extra points, there's a strong expectation that the trait's obligations will be followed. In these cases, there might be rules laid out to cover roleplaying obligations.

Compulsions versus obligations

Now compare in-world things that the characters might encounter like magical geases, mind control rays, charm spells, and brain parasites. These essentially do the same thing. The player character is compelled, rather than obliged, to act in some way.

Of course, modern games almost always structure these things in a meticulously rule-based way, with various "outs", and make them short term and/or weak.

That's because it's a truism of RPGs that it sucks to have your agency taken away.

(Your agency in particular; but your character stuff in general)

After character creation, a traditional TTRPG offers the player the ability to do exactly one thing: make in-world choices on their character's behalf. They can't choose the corresponding outcomes, or odds, or stakes, but they can choose what to try.

Undermining this one capability – even for the sake of in-world things, like established character compulsions or magical mind control – is generally a bad idea. It feels like an attack on autonomy and agency.

So we want to support situations where, through obligation or compulsion, players ought to have their characters act certain ways. But we don't want to take away their ability to decide.

 

How do we square these two things?

Player choice is pretty close to an unequivocal good, making constraint on player choice pretty unambiguously bad. My favourite approach just turns the bad thing into more of the good thing.

➡️ Let the player decide whether their character resists being obliged or compelled, at some in-world cost.

Let's say the player is confronted with some situation where their character is compelled or obliged to act some way. Now they decide whether the character is able to resist, suffering some consequence if they do.

"You resist the call of the purple poppy, at great personal cost. You'll have a morale penalty until you next imbibe it."

"Straining with every part of your soul, you overcome the suggestion spell. You feel a huge fatigue upon you."

"With muscles and tendons clenched, you give the goblin merchant a forced smile and polite nod as you pass. Something in your jaw clicks. Take 2 points of damage."

What is the in-world cost?

The consequence of managing to resist a compulsion/obligation should ideally

• be mechanically grounded (weighty and yet easy to apply)
• be player-facing (rules-based, or at least announced by the GM in advance)
• have an immediate impact (the consequence feels associated with the decision)

Obviously this is easiest in gritty detailed systems with character resources. Stress, Stamina, Focus, whatever it's called as long as it's measured in points that can be taken away.

What if my game doesn't have an appropriate stat?

You could improvise one. 

Or the character could suffer other in-world consequences.

• For an unmet abstract obligation like following a code of conduct, the character might well encounter social problems. Rumours spring up. Hirelings abandon the party. Opportunities dry up. The parent organisation sends a formal rebuke or starts an inquiry.
• For other obligatory traits, the character gets stressed/worried/grumpy/distracted when they don't follow their nature, and end up mislaying an object, getting a bad reaction roll, missing details when looking for clues, etc.
• When an external compulsion is resisted, the character might be disoriented and flub things for a while (rerolling successful rolls, etc).

A specific suggestion

I have long thought that the perfect RPG is one that rewards the PCs with a dice bonus/malus for getting a good/bad night's sleep. I wrote about this the other day. Use a general 'well-being' stat measuring a character's overall mental and physical condition, which the players can push to try to improve, and which modifies most if not all rolls and tests.

This is a perfect candidate for tying in to this choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion system. If you decide your character resists, that bonus is reduced (or malus increased).

Otherwise

You could flip this around and offer a player character experience points (etc) for giving in to their obligation. But this doesn't feel the same, for a couple of reasons.

• Offering a mechanical benefit to specifically "good roleplaying that goes against the characters' best interests" will rankle.
• Paying an in-world cost to overcome a compulsion, or choosing to let the character act on it, make it feel like a thing actually having an effect. Just declining a prize feels like nothing happens.
• Players tend to be risk-averse when it comes to stuff like this, so you'll end up with the character whose character quirk never actually gets them into trouble, and the villain's charm spell that never actually does anything.

Other benefits

Sort of buried the lede here, but the big advantage of doing choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion is that you can hang lots of stuff off a single mechanic. So there's obligatory character traits, but also...

Thing #1: Mind control. As mentioned, taking away agency is usually unfun, can disrupt a game, and can be too swingy in a tactical combat game (strictly worse than save-or-suck); modern games usually make control spells very weak and brief as a result. (Compare OD&D, where the level one Charm person spell could control someone indefinitely, and even the first supplement only reined it in to the point where a particularly lucky superintelligence might shrug it off after a few days)

Suppose instead that the subject of the magic really feels the compulsion deeply, and can resist at some steep cost. And they can be effected by the spell and decide the point where it wears off, as the 'price' to escape goes down over time.

Thing #2: Other magical effects that subvert character control. Illusion, fascination, terror, berserk rage, altered perception, foolishness, cursed objects that whisper dark thoughts. Games tend to have detailed subsystems for these and/or be pretty weak, because of what they do to characters. Using choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion means a simpler, unified system, potentially greater effects, and more player agency through the whole thing.

Thing #3: Social-fu systems that can be used to influence PC action. Games are understandably reluctant to make social skill rolls have actual impact by influencing, let alone determining or constraining, PC choices. Now we have a framework where players will have to decide the lesser of two evils: go along with social influence, or pay the cost (become emotionally run-down, sapped of energy, have low morale, etc).

Thing #4: The same choose-whether-to-pay kind of tradeoff, but introduced to other parts of a game. Possibly as a single unified mechanic.

I'm thinking in particular of things like saving throws and luck points, which aren't very nuanced and involve no in-world decision-making. What if instead you could reliably avoid disaster by suffering some other major long-term consequence? "You fling yourself desperately away but hurt a tendon and can no longer stand up until you receive healing." "You block the blow but are winded and can't succeed on strength rolls until you rest." "You catch a branch on the way past but a strap snaps and your satchel disappears down the mountainside."

Thing #5: In a crunchy character-building system, we now have new options for a character's (in)ability to resist various things. Appropriate traits like "stubborn" or "weak-willed" or "dedicated to the cause" can vary up the cost that a character pays to resist particular obligations or compulsions.

Where'd this idea come from?

I don't remember; I suspect I saw at least the kernel of it somewhere. 

➡️ Lots of games have meta-resources, and sometimes trade in them directly. In Numenera, a GM can suggest something bad may happen and an affected player can either gain XP and let it happen, or lose XP to deny it. Related but not my preferred approach, and not specific to obligations/compulsions.

➡️ In that vein, player-facing story-gaming mechanics may directly affect character actions and/or overall narrative.

➡️ There's this blog post which I found quite compelling. It has a somewhat similar approach to the problem of combat stunts: https://oddskullblog.wordpress.com/2021/11/15/combat-maneuvers-the-easy-way/

➡️ I vaguely remember seeing a GURPS house rule or hack where Disadvantages that compel action can be paid off with FP. I don't recall, but it would make sense to vary the FP cost depending on whether the compulsion was mandatory or resisted with a self-control roll, or more generally if it depended on the point value of the Disadvantage.

If there's a notable/obvious game that does this, let me know!

Out-of-character knowledge: A solvable problem

Note: This primarily applies to trad RPGs, played as trad RPGs. I doubt it has much relevance for story-telling games, or people running a trad TTRPG as a group story-telling exercise.

 

I often think about the player knowledge / character knowledge dichotomy, and in particular the problem of out-of-character or "meta-game" knowledge.

It boils down to this: in any game, within the world a character has capabilities (skills, powers, a viewpoint, certain possessions) that the player doesn't. But the player has information that the character doesn't.

Players, as they get experienced, inevitably end up having knowledge of X that their characters don't. Even if they learned something during the game, they'll eventually have a new, know-nothing character.

People are usually concerned about X being 'monsters' or 'enemy powers and vulnerabilities' or 'magic item properties' or the like. But it can include other, more meta-level, stuff:

• Players hear about what's happening to other player characters, even when they're not together.
• Over-arching information about the scenario, which the player has played or read a review of.
• The GM just said "oops, forget I mentioned that".
• Savviness to the genre of the universe being played in. Players know that pleasant tidy off-ramps in Call of Cthulhu won't be what they seem.
• We remember where our last characters bit the TPK, and the layout of the dungeon level.
  
• The GM brought a whole box of fire imp models to the game.
• The player has read a mathematical analysis of which spells/weapons/feats/etc are optimal.
  

 

Separating player knowledge and character knowledge

I think it's fairly obvious that at least in trad TTRPGs, it's desirable to reduce the impact of out-of-game knowledge on gameplay. Players ideally should have just the information their characters have, and make decisions accordingly.

Otherwise, why not just play with all the GM's stats and maps laid out on the table? Or better yet, given to the players to study before the game? Why not let the players roll to see whether they would succeed or fail at something before deciding whether to try it?

There are solutions, of course

I listed out all the solutions I could think of to "experienced players having knowledge about X that their characters don't". Then, as if I didn't have enough to do today, I rated and ranked them according to my

personal scoring rubric:

✅ Effective

✅ Low-effort

✅ Widely applicable

✅ Incorporates game mechanics

😠 Reduces immersion

😠 Requires doublethink

😠 Culture of play I dislike

😠 GM has to remember something

 

From best to worst, then:

👍 Players who know about X are required to put character points into character knowledge/skill relating to X.

Simple, effective, works with many but not all game engines. Aligns the character knowledge with the player knowledge neatly. Completely passive, but requires some honesty and introspection while setting up. Doesn't work with some kinds of meta-knowledge. Score: 5

👍 The GM uses mostly unique or procedurally generated new forms of X.

Unique monsters, custom-made scenarios, etc. This works well in most situations but is a lot of extra effort. Doesn't work with some kinds of meta-knowledge. Score: 4.5

👍 Any player knowledge of X is rumour, and rumours about X don't match the truth completely.

Very effective and fairly easy for grounded stuff like monsters and setting lore. Much more difficult (possible, but probably not worth doing) for other kinds of meta-knowledge. Risk of it feeling like bait-and-switch. GM has to stay on their toes. Score: 4

👍 Accept that X is well-known within the world.

Very easy, but only narrowly applicable (doesn't work with most kinds of meta-knowledge). Score: 3.5

🤏 Set things up so that knowledge of X has less impact on player decision-making. 

Difficult to do even in the best cases, but can pay off. For example, you can play with time and scene order so that players knowing what's happening with each others' characters at remote locations has less impact on play. Onerous for the GM and there are ways it can all go wrong, but impressive if it does work. Score: 3

🤏 The GM uses lots of deliberate misdirects about X, with in-world justifications.

A partial solution and one that eventually gets tiresome in practise. Technically works on a surprisingly broad set of meta-game knowledge, but doing that would take a ton of work and creativity on the GM's part. Score: 2.5

🤏 Treat the whole thing as not an issue.

I think this is pretty common, especially for sloppier/lower-stakes/beer-and-pretzels play. Players end up using doublethink or feeling vaguely guilty. As low-effort as it gets, but not great pay-off in terms of an actual solution. Score: 2

🤏 Shift the focus of gameplay into identifying that something is X.

Difficult to do, and only works on a narrow set of gameplay content; doesn't help with most meta-game knowledge. Generally requires the GM to be comfortable tinkering with the fundamentals of how the game works. Can be effective within its wheelhouse, but it's high-risk, low-reward. And what happens when players get player skill at identification and then start over at level 1? Score: 1.5

🤏 Players pretend that their characters don't know about X, but play as if they do.

Doublethink all the way. Thoroughly immersion-breaking. Leads to a narrative that seems plausible from the outside, but not from within, even done right. Is it worth it? I know some tables default to this all the time, but I'd rather keep it to just to the most necessary circumstances. Score: 1

👎 GM uses deliberate misdirects about X for no good in-world reason, so players learn they can't rely on any knowledge they have.

Yuck. Takes a lot of effort for pretty much no upside and a lot of downside. Don't do this. Score: 0.5

👎 Players have to commit to their characters not knowing about X, and therefore make deliberately bad decisions. Optional extra: Players get unrelated, perhaps even out-of-game, penalties for (seeming to) act on player knowledge of X.

The worst of all worlds. I've never seen this but I bet it happens. Score: 0

Putting it together

I recommend combining multiple 👍 solutions for best effects. I know that the 🤏 solutions work for some people/games/styles. Steer clear of 👎 solutions.

Did I miss any?

Reviewn June 9: Realistic Gold And Silver

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I’m looking at Realistic Gold And Silver, by Worshipful Satan. It’s a 21-page “guide to bringing the realistic value of gold and silver into fantasy role-playing, based on medieval England.” Arguably more about world-building than roleplaying, it aims to give “a realistic representation of the medieval value of gold and silver”, which although not “necessary or desirable in every fantasy setting, [...] should be an option available to you.”

It's a bit niche. Few games are set in medieval [implied:] Western Europe, or even in a fantasy alt-history version thereof. I don’t think there’s any reason for other Earth-like planets to necessarily have similar quantities of silver and gold ores deposited in their crusts near the surface, let alone wherever the technology to mine them has been developed. And that’s even if said planets are formed by mundane processes rather than fantastic ones.

But all of that said, I am a fan of grounding fiction in real information. The real world is full of details that the first pass of the imagination often fails to create. And for those who want a historicalesque feeling to their gameplay, getting things like coinage right is a must.

Most of this text’s content was matter I’m already familiar with, but I’m a wonk when it comes to this specific intersection of history and economics and gaming, so I think other readers might get a lot more out of it. Realistic Gold And Silver is a good primer. I'm going to look at it on its own terms: it’s a plaintext document exported to PDF, not a polished thesis.

‘Realistic’ gold and silver values

The text admits that its initial premise is something of a canard, that the wide range of places and times and specific contexts means “that we must arbitrarily choose prices for gold and silver which fit our gameplay needs.” I don't think many people approaching a read like this are going to be surprised by that.

I think that working out all coin values by weight of metal is actually a very elegant approach to the TTRPG nightmare of trying to provide a plausibly wide variety of different denomination coins as the adventurers rampage across the landscape, looting archaeological sites. I like it a lot!

• The mechanism boils down to “Large purchases are made by measuring the weight of coins rather than by counting a specific number of coins”.
• It means that you can have the PCs find a big bag of Somewherian silver florins and half-florins and pour them into their sack of local groats and Elsewheric ‘new pence’ and imperial sestertii and you don’t need to consider either number or face value of coins, only the weight of the silver.
• It even works alongside bullion bars and hacksilver, and, as the author points out, works with the damaged, cut, underweight, and clipped coins that you would realistically get in any system without the technology and state power to prevent that.
• Note that this does require that all coins of a particular metal have similar levels of purity. That abstraction may be a stretch for some people who are really into this idea, but they could easily add in e.g. one lower level of purity and track those lesser-quality coins separately.
• Personally, unless I was leaning into the pseudo-historical aesthetic, I would pick a name other than ‘pence’ for the unit of measure/account if I was actually using ‘pennies’ as coins.

It’s interesting that the text recommends this for silver and then treats gold coins as special, counted individually rather than being weighed out. I think this against depends on whether you need that pseudo-historical feeling, but also the degree to which your campaign ramps up. If the PCs are meant to be finding hoards at tenth level that are worth thousands of times what they were getting at first level, then you might start out counting coins and face value variations for each kind of coinage, and transition to measuring each one in turn by weight as (e.g.) silver, electrum, gold, then platinum become commonplace.

I think the text’s attempt to approximate an equivalent modern-day value for medieval coins might give people some wrong ideas. The economic realities were so fundamentally different, states worked differently and their economies were less monetised, most people were growing most of their own food, and so on. People were spending proportionally much more on food because yields were lower and harder to produce at the same time as other costs were proportionally cheaper (e.g. housing could be made quickly by non-experts from cheap materials without regulation and overheads).

Instead, just let the prices speak for themselves. Which the author does:

Equipment and prices

The plausible price list for equipment is nice. It covers a fair amount of ground, mostly matching early D&D equipment lists. The author is clearly aware that you can’t really put together a reliable price list for even a relatively well-attested historical setting, and hedges appropriately (I would appreciate distinguishing in the text which prices are historically supported and which are just guesses, but again, I'm an outlier, most people aren't going to care).

• I like the authorial commentary on little bits of the equipment list, giving context on things like the German zweihänder, the price and usage of caltrops, and disparaging the typical ahistorically high-lux fantasy oil lamps. The text includes a scattering of fantasy gear for specific purposes. I also like spices as loot.
• I think the author overstates the case for not having gemstone faceting. But I have often thought that intaglio should be a much more common kind of treasure!
• Amethyst was a precious stone comparable to diamond and ruby up until the 1700s. The author doesn't mention this, but I suspect had this fact in mind, as the text prices amethyst alongside the other cardinal gemstones (albeit assigning it the lowest value of them).
• The text makes the good but oft-made point that any remotely dragonworthy hoard of gold is simply too much for verisimilitude. The author just advises against having them. My own opinion is that fantasy problems demand fantasy solutions. I can think of a few ways to set up the cosmology and world so that dragons can still have huge valuable (but not completely society-altering valuable) hoards. You do have to abandon attempts at a medieval feel, and consider the knock-on effects, though.

The classic explanation for D&D prices as gold-rush-induced-wealth-disparity has also been done to death, but the author lays it out elegantly. I would have eagerly read any extra material on these speculative fantasy parts, with guidelines for setting ‘true’ prices vs inflated ‘dungeon rush’ prices for equipment and staples, how buying vs selling are differently effected, considerations about prices of dungeon treasure based on proximity to the rush, etc.

Minor text quibbles:

• This is a plaintext document, not fancied up. Design simplicity can be strength! In this case, though, the ragged right edge justification is hard to read.
• The text also would benefit from an editing pass. There’s various typos, some grammar problems, and not much conclusion. Even some of the fundamentals are missing: the reader has to work backwards from disparate numbers to calculate that the author has chosen to value gold at 15× silver by weight.
• A few intersections with game terms (rounds, xp per coin) are highly D&D-specific, but the text doesn't acknowledge this.

My favourite bit:

The last couple of pages provide very important context and commentary, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. They provide a primer on certain game-relevant aspects of pre-modern “adventure economics”. These extrapolations and speculations about fantasy economics are the kind of thing I love reading.

Where to get it:

On itch at: https://worshipful-satan.itch.io/realistic-gold-and-silver

How I think about story games

What follows isn't an attempt at a codification or taxonomy or definition. In fact, it deviates from some of the language people use to describe TTRPGs and story(-telling) games.

It's a way of looking at the design space that I've personally found useful, and a sketch of some of the ways people end up arguing at cross-purposes about story.

 

Story  ∈  TTRPG

First, the process of playing a tabletop role-playing game does inevitably create stories: whether you think that's the point of playing or not; whether you think the GM should try to steer it or plan it or not; whether you think there's story from start to finish or only after the fact.

Back in 1987, Gary Gygax advised that

When the principal characters in a story (the campaign) are free-willed and have a multitude of choices regarding how to proceed, it is counterproductive – and, in fact, impossible – to preordain just how the events in the campaign will unfold.

In 2009, the Alexandrian made the firm case most of us are familiar with: don't prep plots.

A plot is the sequence of events in a story.

And the problem with trying to prep a plot for an RPG is that you’re attempting to pre-determine events that have not yet happened. Your gaming session is not a story — it is a happening. It is something about which stories can be told, but in the genesis of the moment it is not a tale being told. It is a fact that is transpiring.

In 2021, the Angry GM noted that

the story—the narrative—is an emergent thing. Your game’s going to have a narrative when it’s done. Like it or not. And people are going to interpret it based on how they think stories work. Players won’t experience the game as it was. They’ll experience it based on their warped perception of it. [...]

Once your game’s done, it’s going to have had a plot. It’s going to have followed a single sequence of events. There’s going to have been a climax. People—even you—will remember that s$&%. You can either use what power you have to steer the game toward the best narrative possible. One that does the things that thirty millenniums of storytelling have taught us make for good stories. Or you can hope and pray that the emergent narrative is accidentally a good one. It’s your call.

And just recently in 2024, Tom van Winkle wrote a superb article about the nuances of all this. If you only have time to read one blog post today, go read that one instead of this.

The assumption seems to be that to create a story, you need a plot in advance. It's important for the entire entry here to understand that that is not true. [...]

What all the "anti-story" gamers have in common today is that they allowed other people to define the term "story" for them as "pre-designed plot," even though that's not what story means.

He analyses "anti-story" gamers, who

have, apparently unwittingly, accepted the false idea that RPGs would need plots designed in advance to have stories in a story-telling game. Their objections are therefore confusing for many people who are aware that they experience stories arising spontaneously in RPGs.

The underlying claim is: playing a tabletop role-playing game is intrinsically a process of telling a story. And yes, in a technical sense, this is absolutely true. In a TTRPG session, real-world people are making deliberate decisions that lead to the details of a fictional universe and events within it being filled in. Therefore, definitionally speaking, the players and GM have collaborated to tell a story.

Tom van Winkle in particular discusses the literature, and what scholars of story and narrative have agreed on, and how that applies.

The problem, though, is that in everyday, natural English for the layperson, the phrase "tell a story" comes with all sorts of baggage that doesn't necessarily apply to TTRPGs.

The phrase is laden with subtle implications in common English:

1. Telling a story means the storytellers are doing so with the primary goal of producing a 'good story', or at least are telling a story intentionally
2. Telling a story means the storytellers have equal parts, or at least similar amounts of creative control
3. Telling a story means the process is done selectively, without random elements
4. Telling a story means that core elements of the narrative are planned (at least a little in advance), not suddenly discovered
5. Telling a story means that people are making choices in order to further the narrative in a satisfying way, which might not be the 'optimal' or even plausible choices for a particular character
6. Telling a story is unregulated by formal mechanics, or at least largely so

None of these are true of TTRPGs in general. They're not even all true simultaneously for most story-telling games!

So telling a novice who's interested in entering the hobby that a TTRPG is necessarily 'about telling a story' is frankly just misleading that person, unless you stop and break down why 'telling a story' doesn't mean most of what they think it means. (And it may lead to further misunderstandings, like when they hear the term 'player agency' and think it means creative agency over the fictive world, and so on...)

...We still have this phrase, 'story game'.

Two axes

When I think about 'story games' and TTRPGs, I envisage two parallel tracks running left to right.

On the first axis, we have 'rules' to the left and 'freeform' to the right. This axis mostly has to do with the GM, if the game has one.

• A game can be towards the left, 'rules', with lots of rules and processes for decision-making. A game here encourages system mastery for both the GM and the players. It doesn't necessarily imply more control or omniscience for the GM: the game could be heavily reliant on random tables, for instance, or there could be lots of codified rules for how the players get to mess around with the game world directly rather than through their characters.
• A game can be towards the right, 'freeform', taking an open-ended and freeform approach to actual gameplay. In this case the GM is making up a lot as they go along, relying more on the characteristics of the world that have so far been determined than on rules and frameworks provided by the game.
• A game can be somewhere in the middle, with moderate rule support.

On the second axis, we have 'decisions' to the left and 'insertions' to the right. This axis has more to do with the players than the GM.

• A game can be towards the left, 'decisions', where players control their character's mind – the decisions they make – and nothing else. The GM determines what is in the world, controls events and NPCs, and adjudicates PC decision outcomes. (But even the most leftward TTRPGs usually have a carve-out here for character generation, where players get to pick things about their character which the character realistically couldn't have chosen within the world.)
• A game can be towards the right, 'insertions', where players have power over aspects of the game that isn't through their characters. In some situations characters can create, choose, affect, invent, or veto, but in games like this the players have an ability to create, choose, affect, invent, or veto.
• A game can be somewhere in the middle, mixing approaches.
  

The reason I picture the tracks as parallel is that many games, if you map them onto the axes, make a line that's close to vertical. That is,

• Most, though not all, 'traddish TTRPGs' (games with few to no overt player-available story-telling elements) are also mechanically rigorous. They are towards the left on both axes. In general, the GM has lots of power and mechanical support, and the players will know that most things they choose to do will be covered by rules. Whether those rules are good or bad, players may be uneasy with situations where the GM has to go with their gut over having an 'official' answer. It will be unusual (troubling, even) for a GM to invite a player to fill in gaps in the world or determine action outcomes.
• Most, though not all, 'collaborative story-telling games' (in which players are permitted to insert content directly into the world rather than being restricted to attempts to alter the world with their characters) have relatively few rules and processes. They are towards the right on both axes. In general, there isn't anywhere near as much of an authority disparity between the GM and the players, or there might not be a GM at all. The game rules tend to be 'softer' or 'fuzzier', the players are given more overt license to override or ignore them, and the mechanical framework is usually designed more towards 'crafting a satisfying narrative' than towards 'playing a skill-requiring game' or 'simulating a fictional world'.

I'm personally most interested in the leftward side of both scales. I've designed at least one little game that wanders around the middle of the axes, and have a few others sitting on the project pile, but as a designer and player I mostly lean left, towards 'traddish TTRPGs'.

But I'm also interested, from a design point of view, in the rare oddballs. The really open-ended, rules-light TTRPGs with high GM authority, perhaps like this idea. And the highly constrained, rules-heavy, almost formulaic, versions of story-telling games, with no referee.

 

Ways of playing

We can map the way people actually play games onto these two tracks, too. As opposed to how games were designed to be played.

The big example here is (as it often is) D&D 5e. The system is to the centre-left on the rules/freeform track: it's crunchy and extensive compared to a lot of indie games, but not as much as previous editions of the same game, or GURPS, or whatever). And it's quite far left on the decisions/insertions track: the official rules only contain (outside character generation) a few optional and tacked-on suggestions about direct player control over the world.

Interestingly, this isn't always borne out in play. It's possibly due to the rise of people entering the hobby via watching televised 'actual play' by actors, or possibly a trend that's always been there but is just more visible now. A lot of people these days play D&D as if it was further right on the decisions/insertions scale. Players in a lot of games end up with a certain amount of creative control over the world.

To put it in fuzzier terms, they inject elements of a collaborative story-telling exercise into a relatively traddish TTRPG when they play. And that's fine. I suspect they might be better served by playing an actual story-telling game with design elements supporting that, but ultimately, let people have their own fun.

To sum up

This is just how I think about things. It's not a formal system or a position on how things ought to be done.

I think it's fair to say that all TTRPG involves the creation of story – and again, go read van Winkle's article for a really well-considered take – and that some people have the creation of that story as a more primary concern than others. I think that the phrase 'telling a story' has misleading implications when it comes to TTRPGs, which is why I personally avoid saying that TTRPGs deeply involve it, even if (getting into the weeds) it's true. And I find it interesting that when it comes to story, we can try to pin games onto two axes which quite often correlate with one another.

The 'Four Humors' Theory of TTRPG Players

The Angry GM recently published an article about the distinct ways in which players play RPGs, with the specific example of D&D.

He mentioned in particular the rise, or increase, of an attitude towards the game as an intrinsically theatrical activity, adding that to the old GNS classification:

Some players see D&D as a Game. They think it’s about overcoming obstacles, winning adventures, accomplishing goals, and advancing characters.

Some players see D&D as a Narrative. They think it’s about telling a story of fantasy adventure and they want to share the most interesting story possible.

Some players see D&D as a Simulation. They think it’s about entering a world as a character and dealing with it as it is. Whatever happens happens.

And now, some players see D&D as a Performance. They think it’s about putting on a show. They have a role to play and they’ve got to play it to the hilt. In the most interesting and engaging way possible.

It's a good article, worth checking out. While reading, it occurred to me that we could treat GNS Theory as just a way to describe some of the emergent properties of a simple pair of dichotomies, along the lines of another well-respected and evidence-based organisational schema, that of the humoral theory of human health.

Take all of this very seriously please.

A simple pair of dichotomies

Somebody is playing a tabletop role-playing game. They are engaging with an activity, making decisions, thinking about what they are doing. The act of play is, ultimately, a realisation of the act of thought. What is the player spending most of their brainpower thinking about?

There are two dichotomies here.

1. Is the player thinking mostly about their real world environment (the people they are playing with, the game rules, the miniatures, the side conversations)? Or are they thinking mostly about the fictive setting? Or something in between?
2. Is the player thinking mostly in an inward-looking away, about themself and what is theirs or squarely within their purview? Or are they thinking mostly in an outward-looking way, about things around them and outside of their control? Or something in between?

We can put this on a pair of axes, as in this professionally-drawn image.

And now a picture emerges, of what GNS+P is describing, but defined in terms of these innate characteristics of human thought: wet, dry, hot, and cold fictive, reality, inward-looking, and outward-looking.

 

These of course are what modern medicine ludology teaches us are the fundamental building blocks of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile different ways to engage with a role-playing game.

GNS+P Theory doesn't map precisely to the four resulting quadrants, of course. There's some interplay and outliers. We have debatable blobs, not square pigeonholes.

Let's break this exciting new bit of science down.

Yellow bile 'TTRPG as Game'

Temperament: choleric (ambitious, driven, aggressive)

What is a Gamist player thinking about?

Their thoughts tend to be INWARD-LOOKING: upon their own (and usually necessarily, the group's) ability to win; to this end they channel attention into their own player skill, their own knowledge of the rules, and making decisions about their own character's capabilities.

Their thoughts typically tend towards REALITY: the nature of the game and how to win it, the rules and mechanics, win and lose conditions, and how to get other players to go along with their plans. But they do still focus some of their attention on parts of the fictive environment: the obstacles to winning that their character encounters, and the mechanical ways they can get advantages with their character (in particular, advancement). The yellow blob in the diagram therefore stretches away towards the left.

To put it another way, Gamists have an excess of yellow bile.

Black bile 'TTRPG as Narrative'

Temperament: melancholic (sad, delusional, deep in fantasy)

What is a Narrativist player thinking about?

Their thoughts tend to be OUTWARD-LOOKING: towards the group having a satisfying play experience and how the game's play will become a story after the fact. At times, they may care more about their own enjoyment of the game-as-story, thus leaning towards the inwards-looking position.

Their thoughts tend towards REALITY: making decisions for the good of the players' play experience, the emergent story, and what will be 'interesting'. If they care about the game rules, it is in case those become an impediment to higher-order goals. (The Narrativist's thoughts may also drive towards a story with verisimilitude and/or immersion, creeping towards engagement with the fictive environment.)

To put it terms we can all understand, Narrativists may have an excess of black bile.

Phlegm 'TTRPG as Simulation'

Temperament: phlegmatic (calm, reserved, analytical)

What is a Simulationist player thinking about?

Their thoughts tend to be OUTWARD-LOOKING: at the world around their character, and at things they don't already know. They want to discover things about the fictive world and see how they mesh together, and inwards things like their knowledge of the rules and their character are mostly ancillary to that. But the act of engagement still requires making plausible decisions about the character, and the Simulationist does typically spend some attention on their character's place within the world (thus, the blue blob on the chart reaches upward).

The Simulationist's thoughts are almost strictly FICTIVE: They care most about the world they are playing in. The game's rules are meant to simulate a world, the GM is the arbiter of those rules, and the outcome of those rules is to be accepted and examined, never challenged or overruled for the sake of higher-order player/GM goals.

So of course, Simulationists have an excess of phlegm.

Blood 'TTRPG as Performance'

Temperament: sanguine (passionate, mirthful, self-indulgent)

The Angry GM suggested 'Performance' as a new and increasingly popular playstyle category, characterised by (amongst other things) creating

characters with clearly defined motivations, personalities, beliefs, goals, and fears right from the get-go. Their character’s character doesn’t emerge from gameplay and it doesn’t change as the game plays out.

What is a Performer player thinking about?

 

Their thoughts are ultimately INWARD-LOOKING: Most of all, they care about their own character, deciding its intrinsic properties, and then getting across those preselected properties.

Their thoughts are largely on the FICTIVE: How to affect the fictive world by determining a tiny part of it; looking for opportunities in the world to accomplish their secondary goal of expression. External things like 'the game rules' and 'the other players' don't impact this very much for trad RPGs.

Or as we normal, modern people would definitely say in normal, modern terms, "Performers have an excess of blood".

I put something weird on that chart, though.

 Entertainer island

I think there's a little outcrop of the Performative playstyle occupying the diametrically opposite position.

A player can start with a solid foundation of hot, wet inward, fictive humors. That is, they have a firmly imagined static character with predetermined characteristics and sometimes even an intention to pursue a 'character arc', whatever on earth that means when you're (a) playing a game that (b) involves, at its most fundamental level, making decisions about situations that you have no foreknowledge of.

But with those humors as a firm foundation, most of the player's attention is freed up to focus on the actual performative act, which is ultimately outward-looking in reality (given that it is a process of interaction with an audience). With this inversion of the expression of their bodily gameplay humors, the Performer is now thinking primarily about the theatrical entertainment of the other players / the GM / their Twitch audience / passersby in the real world. When taken to excess, to the game's detriment.

Balancing the humors

So it seems likely that people can have a predisposition towards certain humors, and we might or might not regard this as an imbalance of humors.

What are the implications? Let's sketch just a few, presupposing (naturally) that two thousand years of high-quality humoral medicine can be extended to the modern environment of the game table.

• A player who is desirous of a more neutral or 'balanced' playstyle may examine the degrees to which they are inward- or outward-looking, in the fictive world or reality, and deliberately change their behaviours accordingly.
• If the players and the GM at a table all have a similar humoral temperament, then we would expect their games to run well if they indulge in that temperament, although players of a different style would scarcely recognise the game they were playing!
• In rare circumstances where the group dynamics are just right, players of completely opposite humoral temperaments may 'cancel out' at the table due to the ways they use and express those temperaments, resulting in (against the odds) a harmonious, near-maximally-enjoyable game.
• Obviously, players may be able to select the right foods and drinks to modulate any excess of humors. By careful review of TTRPG play I have discerned some of the modern-day nostrums: pizza (hot + dry); coffee (hot + wet); soda (cold + wet); chips (cold + dry).

Science marches ever onwards.

Narration and creative control of the world: A cautionary follow-up

The other day I talked about the advice that 'the extremely unlikely success or failure of an action means something about the world must be different'. I gave some reasons why this can make things harder for the GM and less satisfying for the players. I emphasized how important it is for the GM to be careful with the 'world-state' (the body of information about the fictional environment).

Van Winkle's article which prompted my writing also touched on a related issue with either the GM or a player establishing new facts about the world-state:

What if a player says, after landing a blow, "My character slashes the orc's forehead, causing blood to pour down his face"? Sounds cool, right? So you, the GM, nod your head and continue the excitement. But then the next round the player says, "Hey, shouldn't the orc attack me with some penalty because there's blood in his eyes?"

Van Winkle endorses a solution to this from ktrey: The GM should say "Let's see what happens when the orc attacks you. If he misses, we can say that the blood in his eyes played a part in his failure".

But this advice boils down to: ignore what has actually been established to be true in the game world. We could rephrase it as "the GM/player can establish something that definitely changed in the world but treat it as not actually having changed unless future dice rolls support it having changed". There's a strange implication that the GM can and ought to say "actually, this fact about the world can't have consequences", because the rules (mere tools the GM uses to interact with the world-state) are somehow more important than the underlying validity of the world-state!

I think it's fair to say this is contrary to the GM's fundamental role. Nothing that the GM (or player, in this case, where a player has been handed creative control) establishes about the world should be mere paper-thin "set dressing" which looks nice but which the characters can poke a finger through. Once something is established as true, it becomes usable by any PCs or NPCs or natural forces. Any knock-on effects must actually happen.

The combat example is a minor one, but even it has repercussions. What if the game has a spell that works on bleeding creatures? What penalties does the orc have? Can it benefit from attacks of opportunity / combat advantage / mechanic X? What about if it wasn't an orc, but a creature has corrosive blood, or a gaze attack? How long does it take to clean blood out of your eyes, for bleeding to stop, for the wound to heal?

Just take a more systematic approach

This pitfall isn't hard to avoid.

To begin with, the GM should keep careful track of their game's world-state. They should understand how the game's systems work and what the outcomes of those systems mean for the world-state.

They should only narrate beyond the extent of those outcomes with care, especially in situations like combat when PC life is on the line and players will feel cheated, not just disappointed, if a new piece of the world's reality gets established and then its consequences immediately ignored.

They should be extremely cautious in allowing player involvement in settling what's true in the world (beyond what the rules of the system allow).

For example, in a game that has hit points, the GM must understand what hit points are, what they represent in the world, and how systems interact with them. In some games, if a creature is knocked down to 5 hit points, you can narrate them being stabbed through the thigh. In some (most, frankly), you can only narrate the near-miss, the ensuing exhaustion, the draining of luck, etc. Being stabbed through the thigh, once established, is something that actually happened in the world. If the unfortunate victim is a baseline human and the world is anything like ours, then there are consequences: the victim almost certainly falls down, they may pass out from pain, they may bleed out slowly or in a matter of seconds, and their ability to attack, defend, climb a rope, and so on is drastically reduced. Is that a ton of extra GM work and possible interactions with parts of the rule set? Yes. Is it absolutely necessary? Yes. This is why games with hit points usually don't make them meat points.

But understanding the game's systems means it's easy to narrate. You know that a sword through the thigh is a grievous wound, so you know if the rules say a creature isn't mechanically penalised by injury, then you can't narrate any non-lethal attack as a stabbing. You know that kind of wound can't be slept off, so you know if the rules say a creature can get all their hit points back overnight, then when a creature is knocked to 0 hit points you can't say they were stabbed. In fact, in such a system, you can never narrate any wounds unless the creature also died – unless (a) you are just playing the game for laughs or (b) there's something in your world's metaphysics that makes wounds of all kinds short of death close overnight, with all the ensuing consequences to society.

All of this applies to the example with the orc getting blood in his eyes, of course. There the possible solutions are:

1. Don't let players narrate their attacks and don't ever say anything about the world that isn't true and therefore supported by game mechanics, or
2. Change to a system which actually mechanically supports whatever a player establishes as true about the world via the creative control they have been given, or
3. Switch to free-form role-playing or storytelling.

If you study your game system and can't help but conclude that hit points are neither meat points nor luck points but also both those things, then it's only a matter of time until you have to contend with this issue. There is no solution other than fixing the game system or changing to one that's coherent. Even if you try to sidestep by deliberately narrating combat really vaguely, eventually a player will notice "I suffered wounds so terrible that I failed all but the final saving throw against instant death, and now it is ten hours later and those wounds have literally disappeared without any magic or miracle involved".

Finding a conclusion in all this

Ultimately this is part of a broader point: narrating an action's outcome isn't just a fun little bit of flavour, like it would be if you were telling a story. It's a major part of the role-playing game loop. If a player isn't treating the GM's description of the world as something their character can really interact with, then they might as well not be playing at all! The human interactivity, the "role-playing" part of a role-playing game, is the only advantage it has over other forms of media!

I think it's difficult to create a good role-playing game with collaborative story-telling elements because of issues like these. Role-playing is all about seeing what's in the game-world around your character and treating it as a real situation. When an RPG has story-telling elements, a player has to be both reactive/interactive (role-playing) and creative/declarative (story-telling): the same human brain making semi-godlike decisions about what is true in a world is also trying to make reasonable decisions on behalf of one person with certain goals and traits within that world. Disentangling those roles is difficult. It can cause unpleasant cognitive dissonance.

Think about the consequences before giving players additional creative control in a role-playing game.

"Why Not To Play This Way" – An unlikely success or failure means you learn something new

I'd like to push back on something.

For a very long time – and most recently in an article by Tom Van Winkle last month – lots of GMs and RPG writers have recommended that when a player character's attempt at a task results in a very unlikely success or failure, it should be treated as 'discovering something new about' (i.e., changing the GM's mental model of) the game world.

When the task resolution mechanic reports a surprising success, the task was actually much easier than it seemed (for some reason that the GM comes up with). A surprising failure likewise means something in the world made the task much more difficult.

The lichvanwinkle article aptly sums the idea up as 'The "failure" [or success] with the dice gives an opportunity to define the world in ways that are not just about the character.'

(I like pretty much all of Van Winkle's writing; this is just one of those cases where you nod along appreciatively in silence for years and then only bother to pipe up when you disagree.)

To extend two of his examples:

Surprisingly, the accomplished locksmith fails to pick the simple lock on the store. So...

•  The lock mechanism must be broken, rusted solid, or jammed shut
•  The lock does open, but it turns out the door is stuck or barred
•  As the locksmith is just starting, she hears guards approaching, so can't complete the covert work

Surprisingly, the puny wizard manages to bend the metal bars in the prison window. So...

•  The metal bars are rusted completely through, and give way.
•  The bars were only an illusion all along!
•  The bars are solid, but the wizard finds the stone is old and degraded – he can just chip it away and pull the bars out.

(Note that the probability and mechanic for the unexpected success or failure doesn't matter. It could be 'natural 1 = automatic failure' or 'exploding dice leads to preposterous successes' or 'disregarding the rules, this particular GM always tweaks the Target Number so any PC can always succeed or fail'.)

Now, I usually like the idea of 'overloading' dice with extra meaning. Reducing the number of dice rolls is almost always a great design goal.

So why not here?

This is one of those ideas that's really mostly innocuous, but is so widespread that I want to push back on it for fear that it will become the status quo. "An unlikely dice result changes what's in the world" is definitely not a panacea solution, and you may find that it can create some problems of its own.

And what it boils down is that overloading the action-resolution dice in this particular way thwarts a really fundamental, really effective TTRPG loop:

(i) The GM determines, by whatever means, what is true in the world: its world-state.
(ii) Whenever a player character's passive senses would tell them something remotely meaningful about the world-state, the GM gives the player that information.
(iii) A player can have their PC investigate (interact with) their environment to get further information about the world-state.
(iv) The difficulty of a task is determined entirely by the world-state (including as it does all PCs and NPCs, secrets and fixtures, physics and metaphysical forces, gods and demons, self-inserts and metanarrative powers, etc).
(v) Players can estimate the difficulty of a task by how much they have learned via (ii) and (iii); they can attempt to reduce risk by doing more of (iii) and the GM can make the game require less back-and-forth by doing more of (ii).
(vi) Players have a single 'game action': declare their intention to attempt some task which they describe.
(vii) When a player uses their game action, the GM: first checks whether anything should happen before or simultaneously by consulting the world-state and/or the other players, then checks they and the player are envisaging the same thing with regard to the player action, then considers difficulty via (iv), then (only if the task could either succeed or fail) determines which game mechanics to use to resolve it, then resolves it, then narrates the attempt and its outcome via (ii).

Notice how many of those steps are disrupted if the action-resolution dice can make a retroactive change to the world!

An idea in conflict with TTRPG best practises

More specifically, the idea that 'unlikely dice results change the world' conflicts with six important bits of TTRPG advice which are ubiquitous in modern discourse:

1. Don't make the characters do anything the player didn't try (outside of minor, obvious, safe, unstated things; always assume a character is competent). An 'unlikely dice result' should not change what a character was doing.

• The outcome of the action "I try to pick the lock" can't be "you were so overconfident that you tried to pick the simple lock without torsioning the keyway, so you failed". The player didn't attempt that and the character shouldn't be incompetent.
• Likewise the outcome of the action "I try to bend the prison bars" can't be "you chip away a bunch of what turns out to be ancient, crumbling stone and pull the bars out instead". We can easily imagine cases where the player would decide not to take the alternate option. (And if you stop and give them the "new information", they're now deciding based on information that was first created and then discovered by the outcome of a "use crowbar to bend metal bars" resolution mechanism which didn't do anything. Weird.)
• So this substantially constrains your options for retrofitting the world to an unlikely dice result.
  

2. Don't roll if the outcome doesn't matter. If the outcome of the roll is so surprising that it's incompatible with your vision of the world as GM, to the extent that you have to change your mental model of the world-state in order to keep it consistent, it means you should never have had the player roll in the first place! You should have just said "yes" or "no"! (If the game procedures told you to, it may also mean that those procedures are bad, but that's a different matter). If an expert lockpicker encounters a simple (functioning) lock, and has time and tools and use of her hands, then anything short of a lightning bolt from above means that she opens the lock. There should not be a flat 5% chance that she just "can't". This is true in the real world and in any game that has verisimilitude.

(Rambling aside: Breaking a pick or torsion tool in the lock is rare, at least for someone who knows how to use them. Even if you ascribe that fact to the wonders of modern metallurgy, older locks tend to have larger keyways, so older lockpicks can probably afford to be thicker to make up for it. And most importantly, note that snapping a tool in a lock will almost certainly not jam the lock, preventing it being opened; a competent locksmith will remove the piece and continue to work.)

3. Decide and envisage the world-state before you determine how to adjudicate an action. Whether you need to use any given rule, or involve dice mechanics at all, depends on what is currently true in the world.

• Just because there's a rule for "falling object damage" doesn't mean you use it if the PCs manage to make the moon fall onto their planet.
• Just because there's a rule for "whether an attack hits" doesn't mean you use it when a PC attacks a paralysed target in an otherwise empty room.

Knowing what's true in the world makes the GM's second-most important job (adjudicating action outcomes) very simple. If you were envisaging the lock as functioning, then don't roll: the locksmith cannot fail. If you were envisaging the lock as rusted solid, then don't roll: the locksmith cannot succeed. If you were envisaging the lock as being complex, or being simple but someone has lovingly filled it with honey, then work out an appropriate Target Number and go to the dice. The 'unlikely dice result changes the world' idea makes all this impossible.

4. Decide and envisage the world-state plus the outcome of an action before you describe an event or outcome. If you already know what's true in the world, and you're only letting dice have a say when success or failure are both possible, then you can go from outcome to description immediately.

If an unlikely dice result can change the world, this is more difficult: You have to leave space for things that even you, the GM, don't know about the world. When the dice give a surprising success or failure, you have to – on the fly – determine a change which is compatible with what the player characters already know and also what the consequences of that change will be and more specifically whether this 'breaks' anything else in the world-state or in the current scenario. And then you have to narrate the action outcome while incorporating how the player characters discover the newly-created information.

5. Players are given key information up front, can get as much descriptive detail as they ask for, and can find out more relevant information by interacting with their environment. But, whoops, now an unlikely dice result can change the world retroactively, so what info can be given out?

The GM's single most important job is providing concise, accurate, memorable, relevant descriptive narrative. You just can't do this if you have to worry about 'saving room for' corner cases. If the prison bars are strong, rust-free, corporeal, and set firmly in strong rock "unless in the future I need them not to be, if the weakling wizard rolls high enough to bend them", you have a big problem which grows bigger with every interaction the player characters have with the bars.

At some point, as more and more 'explanations' of the surprising dice result are ruled out by what the players know about the world, you're left with just two options, both unsatisfying.

1. A preposterous deus ex machina ("a sudden earthquake rocks the room just as Feebliander begins to push the bar! The wall caves in!"). Even if you try to disguise its extempore nature, you're likely to get the problem of "We immediately waste a bunch of time and resources investigating what has caused this very unexpected thing which we take to be a big clue about other parts of the game world."
2. A fake or fiat perception failure ("I know I said Feebliander thought the bars looked new and sturdy when he spent ten minutes studying them carefully, but as he applies the crowbar, he finds them to give way in a spray of rust.") Many game systems have perception mechanics, including ones that are meant to be passively or automatically applied, in which case as soon as you make surprising dice results retrospectively change the world, you've immediately failed in your job of correctly and impartially applying the rules, by either not invoking them or not taking into account information about the world.

6. Don't let the players think you don't know what's true in the world. This is more important than it sounds, especially for invested, smart, skilled players.

But suppose they notice that a lot of the time when they roll really high or really low, there's a bit of a pause and then the GM tells them their action fails or succeeds because of something they hadn't already known about the world. They're going to lose faith that the GM is thinking about their own world. They'll (accurately) regard that as a troubling sign. They'll start thinking things like "the GM can't have known the lock was completely rusted, because then what would be in the point in making me roll?"

More pragmatically, they're going to start checking for all the little factors – is the lock old, is it rusted, is it gummed or jammed or filled with honey, is the door stuck, is anyone else around – BEFORE attempting to pick the lock, and then what are you going to do when the expert locksmith rolls a 1?

Okay yes but

Most of the rationale for 'unlikely dice result changes the world' was that the GM wants to be surprised sometimes. That's valid, right?

Yes, of course.

• You might be worried about fairness ("otherwise I'm just deciding by fiat that the lock is in good working order").
• You might be aware of your own cognitive blind spots ("otherwise I'll just end up using the normal defaults – normal locks, sturdy bars, guards who can't be bribed, trees with enough branches to climb").
• You might be using a system that's simpler than you'd prefer ("Am I really meant to just make up all the Target Numbers?").
• You might want the PCs to encounter more variety than you're capable of providing ("I'm always thinking about the next encounter, so I never remember to have a more mundane task throw an unexpected boon or bane").

So how can you attain this without overloading the task resolution dice?

I think the answer is: take a more rigorous approach, using a dedicated dice roll. You could do it any number of different ways; the key is to identify early on that there's something with various possible states/aspects/nuances which could change task difficulties, and having identified it, quickly make a dice roll to see what's true in your world. Once you have determined the world-state, all the rest of the GM's job is exactly as easy as it ever was.

The solution

It's one of those things you can learn to do without a formal process, just as an instinctive part of the regular rolling-dice-for-no-apparent reason that you ought to be doing anyway to keep the players alert.

But if I had to encode it as a specific procedure, I'd say:

• Pay attention to cases where you start describing something with an obvious PC interaction, especially where you're likely going to have to later improvise that task's difficulty.
• In such cases, first envisage how the world probably is – the default state of the lock given who bought it and used it and when; the condition of the bars given whether this is a gaol in use or a crumbling ruin; the loyalty of the guards given who hired them to do what; etc.
• Then just roll a dice to see whether it's actually better or worse overall for the PCs, with a 1 being "version of the worst case that's still completely plausible" and a maximum roll being "version of the best case that's still completely plausible", the gradations between being easily decided on the fly. Worse cases make for harder Target Numbers for most approaches to most tasks, and so on. A "middle" result (either of the two numbers around the dice's average, which a GM should know) means "don't change what you first envisioned at all".

Pros:

• This is fast, simple, and easy to remember.
• If you forget to roll, or only remember after the characters have started fiddling around with things, it doesn't matter. You don't need to remember every time, only sometimes.
  
• You can pick up whichever dice is closest and use it.
• Your expectations about the world as the GM often hold true, and things only deviate from your expectations as far as you'll let them.
  
• When you 'discover' something new about the world, you get that information before you go to action resolution, available to give to any player who has their character investigate how hard various approaches to the task are going to be.
• You never get weird action results that are borderline- or outright-incompatible with the world you envisioned.

I think this better serves the overall purpose of "freedom in narrating the events in a fantasy game without hesitation or squabbling over rules and rulings. Let the dice serve your narration without requiring your narration to mess with the rules further."

Cons:

• That pesky extra dice roll...