A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

[Ovinomancer]

Like @Bedrockgames said D&D, and in particularly 5e, has made attempts to appeal to a wider market. It had to.

They have Rule 0, Personality Characteristics, the Inspiration Mechanic, The Role of Dice which discusses Say Yes/Not and Roll the Dice, Plot Points (which caters for player authoring), Success at a Cost, Degrees of Failure, and even Multiple Checks (sadly not going to far as to fully adopt the 4e SC, but its kinda there).
I think they have done a stellar job and the shift has already happened.

EDIT: Crap, ninja'd by [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]

All of those are, however, gated by the GM, not the players. The locus of authority is still, with all of that, firmly with the GM. Well, plot points, aren't, but that's it. 5e is still very, very firmly DM-centered.

 

[Sadras]

All of those are, however, gated by the GM, not the players. The locus of authority is still, with all of that, firmly with the GM. Well, plot points, aren't, but that's it. 5e is still very, very firmly DM-centered.

That is all true. I tried Plot Points once, but I have a player who pushes the envelope. If the mechanic is vague or loose he will push it. He pushed it so bad, the rest of the players groaned because of the fiction introduced. I realised after that the best thing for me to do was just scrap that idea. I could not have the game lose some internal consistency every time he used a plot point.

And despite all the flack we get from using the Say No toolkit in this thread and being lumped under the MMI label, I do not feel bad in using it (Saying No).

I DID FEEL BAD when I had to Say No to the player using Plot Points. I don't want to be in that position again. I don't want to be in a position where I have to rise to my understanding of MMI-DM and have to deny someone their ability to change the fiction because of my idea of the internal consistency. I don't want that stress at my table.

 

[Maxperson]

Max, it's fact that nothing that happens in your game is realistic because it's fiction. You made it up. You can't make up the real world. "Realism" in this case has nothing to do with the real world, only your preference for how outcomes are explained.

And it's a fact that this idea you are putting forward that something must mirror reality or be utterly and equally unrealistic is a False Dichotomy. Realism is a spectrum, not an absolute. Repeating your False Dichotomy incessantly isn't going to make it correct.

Let's take two movies. Good Fellas and The Wizard of Oz. Good Fellas, despite not mirroring reality, is much more realistic than The Wizard of Oz. They are not equally unrealistic.

The real world has absolutely nothing to do with your fiction, and so "realism," as in reflecting the real world, is a red herring. "Realism" as in "believable, coherent, internally consistent fiction" is fine, but your preferred method doesn't necessarily generate that in any greater quantity than another.

Riiiiiight. Because gravity exists in the game, but doesn't exist in the real world, because if it did exist in the real world, then the real world would have something to do with the fiction of gravity in the game. Knives don't exist in the real world for the same reason. And so on.

Reality does connect to the game in thousands, if not millions of different ways to varying degrees. Those degrees fall somewhere on the realism spectrum.

 

[hawkeyefan]

4e was very hackable in this regard. It also was, largely, difficult to approach because it tried to be so malleable. Actually, I'd say it was schizophrenic, because you could play it traditionally (for D&D) by ignoring some things or you could play it much more narratively by ignoring other things. If you actually tried to use it as presented, especially in the first trilogy, it was an unclear mess in many places.

5e did bolt on a few narrative things, but their use, as written, is still gated by the DM, which is why you see so many threads about how bad/useless/hard to use inspiration is. 5e largely moved back towards being more GM-centered, not less. As someone who's trying to see where they can put a few more narrative touches into an ongoing 5e game, I'm realizing that it's a hard fit for a lot of things, and I'm having to overcome player inertia in a lot of places. I've introduced inspiration as something players can claim at any time by just referencing a TBIF (once per trait per session) in relation to the action. 4 sessions in and it's been used once, when I prompted it. Sigh. But, oddly, these guys do GREAT in Blades.

For sure. 5E is still a GM centric game. The Inspiration mechanics are pretty thin, and from what I’ve seen, easily ignored by many groups. But their presence, and the idea of TBIF is promising. I also think that the game is very modifiable, and that design will hell expose more people to different techniques. Ideas are ported fromother games into the 5E system all the time, and the DMsGuild helps make sure there’s an easily accesible place to see that kind of stuff.

But there are always folks who won’t even consider such ideas, or won’t be exposed to them because they’re uninterested in changing their game. Which is fine. But I do find it odd how many seem to want to be involved in discussions about varieties of techniques, but all they do is insist on their method. The tricks in poker effect, as you called it. Like someone jumping into a conversation about sports, and then only talking about baseball. The mention of a touchdown by someone else seems baffling.

And interesting how your players are open to player driven play in one system, but resistant to it in another. Obviously the established mechanics play a bi part in that, but I wonder if it’s equally about perception or expectation.

 

[Numidius]

The problem mainstream RPGs have though, is they need to appeal to you, to Pemerton, to me and to Max Person. They have to get as many people as possible. I am not saying that means they can't address these things. But obviously how they address them is going to matter because they want to attract all the gaming blocks while not pushing any of them away. Less mainstream games have always had the luxury of being able to focus more on stuff like this, because the audience will find them, and they can cater to a more narrow audience.

EDIT: Just to reiterate, the point of my original response to your post was just to say it should be more nuanced and not presented as a binary (I think a game could have a more even mixture rather than lean hard to one side or the other for instance). Just don't want to veer into an unnecessary tangent.

I got it

Maybe all those streaming d&d sessions of nowadays will slowly and nuancing change the paradigm for a broader audience, bringing in more input from Pcs as unexpected twist, story emerging, character development similarly to a tv series, or a reality show.

 

[Numidius]

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but I can say that no one in this thread should be the determiner of that. 5e hasn't changed and it's leading a renaissance in gaming right now (perhaps due to streaming being also new, but still, 5e appears easy to stream), so it's ingrained DM-centered authorities clearly isn't a bad model. The non-DM-centered authority games are still pretty small slices of the market, even together.

Now, you and me might make changes, and discussions like this can aid it, but the market is vastly bigger than the handful of posters still engaging in this thread, or the slightly larger bucket of posters that come to ENW to argue about pretend-elf games on the internet.

Few but good
Representative of more or less the whole spectrum?

 

[Numidius]

Like @Bedrockgames said D&D, and in particularly 5e, has made attempts to appeal to a wider market. It had to.

They have Rule 0, Personality Characteristics, the Inspiration Mechanic, The Role of Dice which discusses Say Yes/Not and Roll the Dice, Plot Points (which caters for player authoring), Success at a Cost, Degrees of Failure, and even Multiple Checks (sadly not going to far as to fully adopt the 4e SC, but its kinda there).
I think they have done a stellar job and the shift has already happened.

EDIT: Crap, ninja'd by @hawkeyefan
EDIT2: and Ovinomancer

Really glad to hear it.
The impression I get from outside is of a series of adds on to what is a fairly standard Od&d concept.

Would you suggest to me 5e if I wanted a non combat centered campaign?

 

[Bedrockgames]

I got it

Maybe all those streaming d&d sessions of nowadays will slowly and nuancing change the paradigm for a broader audience, bringing in more input from Pcs as unexpected twist, story emerging, character development similarly to a tv series, or a reality show.

Honestly, and I haven’t seen a huge amount of CR, what they do seems more remiscent if 90s style play to me

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

No one asked, but my rule of thumb is: Named Npc are under Gm control, Not yet named (minions or bystanders) ones are open to suggestion/usage from the players in the present scene. Should they become companions, Dw offer rules for managing them depending on what they want from the Pc: money, doing good deeds, glory etc.

Btw, the first thing I noticed in 5e was the lacking of a Social Combat/resolution, so to speak. Useful in a situation like the Barbarian and his wife.

Right, this is a characteristic DW shares with all other 'generalized resolution system' types of game where you can apply its mechanics equally well in combat, in a social interaction, or in some sort of 'exploratory' play. This reduces all interactions to a common theme, that of conflict resolution, with common elements of stake setting, intent, fictional explication, etc. IMHO these are the most powerful sorts of game mechanics. PbtA-based games have their own interesting boundaries, with the move system, but those are firmly aimed at circumscribing the genre and tone, not constraining control of the fiction.

 

[Numidius]

Not everyone just accepts every rule put in the book though. If they did, we wouldn't have editions splits and edition wars. But I guess rather than speak abstractly, what sort of thing would you like to see in a game like D&D in order to address this issue (and mind you, I don't even play 5E at this point, so it doesn't really affect me one way or another which direction D&D goes anymore).

Mmhh... to start with what the authors said before the launch, actual Modularity would be fine*.
Then moving away from the wargaming aspect towards the 3 Pillars, and having a unified resolution system (also modular, for those who prefer granularity and differentiation among the three Pillars) granting a satisfying resolve for disputes at the table; eventually having classes distributed between the 3P; more emphasis on setting modules than adventure paths: that leads to Pcs broader Action Declaration in the context of setting- game- situation and in which Pillar/Class/Skill Set the Pc is focused on.

And a black strong coffee at the end

*(Burning Wheel comes to mind for its modularity)