quantum ogre reborn

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It’s time we re-examine what we mean when we use the term “quantum ogre”.

The seed of this post started when Valeria posted her review of Fabula Ultima and quoted Emanuele Galletto (the game’s author) using the term to describe the game’s playstyle. If I had been vaguely aware of the term beforehand, that post was what compelled me to read the original definition. Over a month later, Rowan wrote an excellent introduction to the OSR which is mostly unrelated to our discussion here today save for one sentence:

Players cannot experience discovery, overcome objective challenges, or make truly meaningful choices without concrete, immutable fiction.

I had some nitpicks about this. At the time, I didn’t really feel like they were worth talking about. Rowan spent a full paragraph talking about how the OSR aligns with Blorb Principles (a post for another day), and I know contextually that he probably is not intending to make sweeping generalizations about non-OSR play culture. And yet. I mentioned my nitpicks to a friend and those remarks turned into a fiery discussion, a blog post about objectivity, and eventually simmering discourse in another discord server altogether. Everyone involved seemed to be using the term “quantum ogre” as ammunition, yet we clearly had different definitions and metrics of its worth.

What is a quantum ogre? What does it have to do with meaningful choices? Let’s set the record straight.

a photobash of Tactics Ogre Reborn with the word "Quantum" over the front of tactics. there is also a pixel art ogre.

Part One: The History

Our journey begins here, with a short post from Dreams in the Lich House describing “Illusionism”:

A term for styles where the GM has tight control over the storyline, by a variety of means, and the players do not recognize this control.

Lich House presents our first theoretical example (paraphrased):

You have prepared an adventure that begins with a bandit encounter. You place these bandits on the west road out of town, where everyone knows some bandits lurk. Last week, the party indicated they were probably heading west, but this week, they decide to head east towards a bigger city instead. Illusionism is when you move the bandit encounter to the east road to force your players into your pre-planned story.

While Lich House calls this railroading, I disagree somewhat — if only because the example does not have enough information to appropriately determine whether the players didn’t want to fight bandits or if they simply wanted to explore the larger city. Regardless, I’m willing to let him cook.

Lich House continues to dig into the concept of illusionism and its implications for time-sensitive plot hooks. While he condemned the idea of “socially acceptable” railroading in the previous post, he seems more open to the idea in the brief recap:

Illusionism implies, “Player choices don’t always matter, but as long as the players think their choices matter, they’ll keep playing.” In other words, a game where the DM applies Illusionism can still be fun.

What does it mean for a choice to matter? I think people have different definitions. I think it’s important to think about whether consequences are a change in game state or imagined space. I think you have to consider whether something is actually a consequence or just an independent event unrelated to the decision you actually made. In any case we’ll revisit this question later.

The main question Lich House poses is actually about the opportunity cost of choices and whether it is appropriate to use illusionism to ignore the passage of time for modules placed within your sandbox game. He presents the second example (paraphrased):

The players have a quest to find a powerful magical sword to deliver to the mayor of a village in Barovia in order to protect against an ancient evil that’s stirring. Some time has already passed and it will take them a total of six months to arrive. Under illusionism, the GM has the power to decide that Strahd is still waking when the players arrive, or perhaps just recently awake. Alternatively, if Strahd has been awake for six months the village is probably gone and the villagers turned into a zombie army.

This culminates into Lich House‘s corollary to illusionism:

When the players make a choice, there should be consequences regarding the choices not made.

This is a fancy way of saying that choices should have an opportunity cost. I think that’s a great sentiment…but often you don’t know what the opportunity cost of an action is going to be until it’s too late. I’m not sure that this actually matters significantly to the conversation about player agency.

On the third day of blogging, Lich House refines his ideas on illusionism by considering techniques from improvisational theater. Referencing the concepts of “incorporation” and “denial”, he builds out the previous two examples into separate situations based on how many facts have been established before the players make their choice.

For the first example, he posits that the GM would be free to place the bandit encounter on any road if it had not previously been established that they were on the west road. On the other hand, if the players were aware of bandits on the west road and chose east, the only way for the GM to maintain internal consistency is to double down and establish that the rumors of bandits on the west road were a lie planted by the bandit leader. The acceptableness of this is mostly based on whether the players had indicated they were going west in spite of the bandits and changed their minds spontaneously, thus causing the GM to waste their prep.

Understanding that contextual information determines the appropriateness of illusionism allows Lich House to draw the line on how to handle the Barovia example. If the players don’t know that the mayor needs the sword to protect against an awakening evil, then it’s fair game to keep the adventure site in the same state for six months. If the players do know, then the world should maintain consistency and reflect the passage of time with an awakened Strahd.

Lich House finalizes their thoughts with the following guidelines:

Player choices should be meaningful and have consequences.
Player choices are based on partial information.
The DM is obligated to administer the setting in a way that ensures player choice is meaningful, and in accordance with previously established facts.

In my opinion, the discussion could have ended here. These are fine guidelines and I for one, have no disagreement. Unfortunately, we have six more blog posts to cover in order to fully understand the historical definition of the quantum ogre.

Several months after the illusionism series, Lich House writes a followup post highlighting the fact that the perception of player agency can change based on how much information they have about the choices they’re making. He presents us with the third and most important example (paraphrased):

The party is looking for a macguffin, and they know it is in one of three woods. Scripto-GM pre-plans the contents of all three woods in advance and places the macguffin ahead of time. Improv-DM creates an ogre encounter and leaves both it and the macguffin unassigned. Wherever the party visits first will have the ogre encounter and the macguffin will be placed in one of the other two woods.

Using the guidelines put forth in the third illusionism post, Lich House reasons that Improv-DM hasn’t violated player agency since the party had no expectations for or against meeting an ogre. Notably, if the party had obtained more information beforehand, that would constrain Improv-DM from moving the ogre and macguffin around.

Player Agency is a Subjective Standard.

Unfortunately, in a later edit — which seems to be a response to the upcoming quantum ogre post — Lich House seems to have completely abandoned his nuanced position, stating that any kind of illusionism is a bad practice, though what players don’t know won’t hurt them.

Finally, we reach the nucleus of our discussion with the post that coined the term quantum ogre. Hack & Slash writes this article as a direct response to the above shell game post.

Here’s the problem: Hack & Slash doesn’t really define what the quantum ogre is. He uses it as a shorthand reference for Lich House‘s example with the three woods and the ogre encounter. However, even Lich House has established that the situation changes based on how much information the party has before making their choice. This is part of the reason we’re stuck in the discourse swamp whenever the term quantum ogre is raised in conversation.

If you always pre-ordain ‘your precious encounter’ then the players never have the experience of choosing correctly and skipping right to the end (which is fun for them).

First: this “fun” is specifically about players choosing “correctly” on a choice with no information, making it a meaningless blind guess. By Hack & Slash‘s own words, presenting them with the blind guess robs the players of agency. Second: it is an assumption that there is a “correct” choice. This is one of the major points Emanuele Galletto brings up when she talks about quantum ogres in Fabula Ultima: it is not a game with good and bad courses of action.

Hack & Slash continues:

The flaw of the Quantum Ogre is that, if you have a party who plays smart, he won’t be quantum long before you enter the woods, and then you’ve wasted time by not assigning him to a location already or you become the jerk DM where ESP doesn’t work, the ground doesn’t hold tracks, and if you try and teleport – suddenly anti-magic fields everywhere.

What he seems to have missed is that this is something that Lich House already covered in his posts. If the party obtains information on the ogre’s location prior to entering the woods, it constrains Improv-DM from moving it around. As far as I’m concerned, this is simply the game working as intended. My party is proactively investigating and making strategic plays to avoid danger. Sometimes, they won’t be able to avoid it — they might learn that the macguffin is in the same woods as the ogre.

If the only way you know how to get your players to fight an ogre is to have them be surprised by it, then you need to open your mind to the possibilities.

The date for this post precedes the quantum ogre post, but it’s a direct response to both it and the shell game post….despite the fact that the shell game post’s edit references this post. I’m guessing it goes here in chronological order.

Lich House is back and he’s waffling.

There’s no difference between these scenarios: walking into the woods and running into a scripted ogre they failed to learn about; a randomly generated ogre via an encounter table; or the ogre the DM dropped on them through sheer fiat.

But when the DM always places his ogre encounter in front of the players, he’s predetermining an outcome and perpetrating a railroad. We can always identify the bad behavior from the DM’s side of the screen, even if the current state of player knowledge doesn’t allow them to see it.

This straight up doesn’t make sense to me. What’s the difference between placing an ogre through “sheer fiat” or “always placing”? Regardless, Lich House states that agency is not violated from the player’s perspective if they have no additional information, but an omniscient viewer can identify agency violation by looking at what the GM does. Again, this just doesn’t make sense. What does the word agency mean to you?

I think we could follow this line of questioning deep into philosophy hell. What is free will? I don’t want to overthink this. As far as I’m concerned, agency is simply the ability to make choices. Whether the choices and consequences are meaningful is where the debate should be happening.

Hack & Slash has three more posts on the quantum ogre. I have some broad strokes opinions on his use of the term, but I’m going to try and wait until the last one to really get into it.

The post opens with the stated goal of securing player agency by letting choices have effects that relate to the intents of that choice. This is an interesting factor — intent — and it hasn’t been highlighted yet. Hack & Slash divides his contingencies into two main categories: providing enough information to make a choice with intent and guidelines for maximizing the freedom of those choices.

Don’t give the players blind choices. Always give some sort of information with the choice. A choice with no information to distinguish between the options isn’t any sort of choice at all.

Putting aside the fact that blind choices are an inevitable part of life, it is important to have them because they allow players to express their characters in the absence of external influences. You paint onto a blank canvas. There is no right or wrong. The Toa of Air picks left because he hardly ever goes left.

The outcome of a situation in play should never be predetermined—one cannot decide ahead of time how the choice a player makes will play out, otherwise the player has no input and is therefore not engaged.

Outcomes are not atomic results. The party might pick the right forest with a macguffin but the ogre encounter happens no matter what. Or maybe the ogre isn’t in the woods but it ambushes them on the return journey. “Side effects” and independent events can happen no matter what choice is made. This is not a violation of agency, these are simply occurrences beyond the direct control of a player.

We have thoroughly departed from the initial concept of the quantum ogre at this point. Hack & Slash uses the term to speak about information, transparency, and improv-style rules for arbitrating player decisions. Half of the post is spent almost as an FAQ about the nature of agency. I get the sense that Hack & Slash was exhausted by the discourse at this point. There is one particular entry that sheds some light on our quantum ogre interrogation:

“There’s no right way to run a game. My players have control over the world and we do improv storytelling, and everything is tied into their story!”

Yes, believe it or not, I’ve run games like that before—where players know their plot arc, and have script immunity, and it’s about drama and acting. That is not D&D. It’s not structured that way—it’s a game, and one with fairly clear expectations and rules. You can certainly change up and add to D&D—it’s designed that way. But this is a blog about the game of old-school D&D, the type where you don’t name your fighter till level 3, and it’s structured around exploring dungeons and clearing hexes. I’m glad you are having fun, but be clear about your house rules being house rules—if you say that characters can just say anything and have it be true in improv style; That text doesn’t contain a the rule about characters making up story elements as a part of play.

There it is in black and white. Hack & Slash is uninterested in applying the concept of agency to games outside of old school D&D. We can use the term quantum ogre all we like, but the original definition was a weapon forged to defend old school play culture. Our history lesson could stop right here because I think I’ve made my point, but for completion’s sake we’ve got one more post to visit.

Two years after the original string of posts, Hack & Slash defines the quantum ogre:

It is a situation in which the Dungeon Master removes agency from the player because of his desire for an outcome. … What that means is that the player tries to do a thing (cast a spell, use a skill, attack a creature, make a choice) and the Dungeon Master does something to actively neutralize that thing!

Right away we can see how this term has escalated into a boogeyman from its humble origins. This adversarial nature was not present in the musings of Lich House or even Hack & Slash‘s first post where the Improv-DM was viewed as misguided — not hostile.

Similar to the previous post, Hack & Slash writes in the format of an FAQ, posing rhetorical questions (presumably based on comments) and answers them. Despite what we know about the nature of Hack & Slash‘s narrow definition, there are a few entries that will help us examine the quantum ogre.

“Isn’t a Random table essentially a Quantum Ogre? How can you have the players run into a village with a festival? Is it fair to do so? Can the Dungeon Master ever decide anything?“

Of course you can decide things. Of course you can just invent things you think would be cool during play. The Quantum Ogre isn’t about putting an ogre in the woods. It’s about invalidating the players decisions. Any time you are deciding something or making a choice that does that, you are at risk of invalidating agency.

Hack & Slash defines quantum ogres as the GM removing player agency when they react to a player’s choice. I posit that reacting to a player’s choice doesn’t necessarily remove their agency.

Many of the examples I’ve been given, can’t even be addressed in terms of agency, because they depend on context. I ran a pathfinder game and told the players, there would be ‘decision points’ during cutscenes and that the game was about the tactical environment. Their choices would affect the forthcoming battle and at certain points they would have options about which map they were going to take on next. Even though the adventure was linear, they were able to act with agency. There were no quantum ogres or railroading because the agency they expected to have at the start of the game was never infringed.

What if they wanted to something else? They didn’t. That’s a railroad! No agency was actively removed during play – it was traded by choice for a more complex planned battle!

We’re fully in uncharted waters now. According to Hack & Slash, agency as measured by an absolute metric doesn’t matter. It’s the disruption of expected agency that is the unforgiveable sin of the quantum ogre. What does this mean when we’re using it outside of the old school play culture? I don’t think we can stop using the term, so we’re going to have to find a way to establish what we mean in a way that works outside of its original context.

Hack & Slash writes his final word on the matter:

The Quantum Ogre isn’t a thought experiment. It is an example of certain type of gaming problem, with a list of concrete solutions designed to resolve those problems and make role playing more fun for both the players and the Dungeon Master.

It’s clear that the quantum ogre meant something extremely specific to Hack & Slash. It was a shorthand for a series of problems in the OSR community a decade ago. Maybe this definition is still useful to OSR folks, but the term has spread further than that, and I intend to get everyone on the same page.

Agency is the ability to make choices.

Part Two: A Modern Definition

A quantum ogre is when the GM changes or establishes the facts of an unknown based on player actions.

In the classic Lich House example, Improv-DM changes the location of the ogre based on the destination the players decide. Note the specific constraints on our definition: the thing being changed must be an unknown to the players. It doesn’t make sense to use the term “quantum” unless we are making a reference to the wave function collapse under observation. This is the “Schrodinger’s Module” from Lich House‘s second post on illusionism.

Furthermore, the term only applies when done in reaction to player actions. Otherwise, this is simply the GM deciding things by fiat — stocking a dungeon or preparing an adventure site. The most common manifestation of the quantum ogre is simply the GM placing encounters based on the direction the players choose to travel rather than prepping all possible directions. On a more abstract level, this could be something like the GM changing the identity of the Black Knight to be the same man who killed a player character’s parents.

I don’t think most people have a problem with a GM tailoring their campaign based on player choices. The objections happen because quantum ogres are a type of action that can negate those choices — and this is the specific use-case that Hack & Slash restricts his definition to. Unfortunately, there are just as many valid uses for quantum ogres, and the term has become so popularized that we cannot assume people mean those problematic instances.

Emanuele Galletto has stated that Fabula Ultima is a game of continuous quantum ogres:

Quantum Ogres are only a problem when there’s actually a good and bad course of action to take

The agency is not in picking the tunnel without the ogre, it’s in deciding how to tackle the inevitable ogre fight, and express how that fight has changed the character

There is an incredible amount of agency in Fabula Ultima. Players get to wield the authorial pen constantly and have the ability to declare truths about the world at will. It’s also a game where the player characters are explicitly protagonists and because of that, the GM has a responsibility to shape the game around player decisions. Sometimes that means spawning an ogre to attack the village the players are protecting.

I feel strongly that Lich House got it right in his third post on illusionism. Player choices should be meaningful and have consequences. Player choices are based on partial, imperfect information. The GM is obligated to administer the setting that ensures player choice is meaningful and consistent with previously established facts.

In addition to the GM’s efforts, it is the responsibility of players to give their choices meaning in absence of information. Every action is an opportunity to express your character and their interiority. It is also a shared responsibility for players to seek information and the GM to establish the known facts of a choice.

If I’ve done anything here today, I hope that I’ve been able to highlight the historical context that the term quantum ogre was established in. I like my definition, but even if it doesn’t catch on, I want people to be aware that the original post was speaking to the OSR play culture and did not object to the practice when applied to other games.

If I dare to dream further, my hope is that I have demonstrated the ways players can make truly meaningful choices with reactive, mutable fiction.

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