D&D (2024) Do you plan to adopt D&D5.5One2024Redux?

soviet said:

Your hypothetical player thinks it's plausible and fits with the campaign setting as constructed, otherwise they wouldn't have used the ability, right?

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no, they just think they have an ability that says 'you can do X' and often don't consider, or are unaware of any extenuating circumstances

soviet said:

If you already have a set idea as GM of how the adventure should go, I can see how anything that diverts from that might seem implausible. But that assessment would be wrong.

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It feels like the above post is pivoting to accuse DMs of railroading. So I am assuming that is not the intent and so I am focusing on visualizing world building.

In that case, "would be wrong" or "could be wrong"?

It's great if someone literally wants the printed rules to trump everything 100% of the time. (I fireball the blackmail letter to destroy it! Sorry, bad guy is holding it so it isn't hurt at all). If someone repeatedly implies anyone who ever says no and overrules the printed rules is always wrong to do so, then that feels like one true wayism.

soviet said:

If you already have a set idea as GM of how the adventure should go, I can see how anything that diverts from that might seem implausible. But that assessment would be wrong.

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Who said anything about how the adventure is going to go? As a DM I've made some decisions about how the world works, it's completely different.

But this sounds an awful lot like "If you don't agree with me you're doing it wrong." Have fun with that.

soviet said:

If you already have a set idea as GM of how the adventure should go, I can see how anything that diverts from that might seem implausible. But that assessment would be wrong.

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this feels pretty disingenuous, there is a world of difference between ‘this is not what I intended to happen’ and your ‘your feature reliably beats 1 in a million odds, but we consider that plausible’

Oofta said:

You have different players than I have had. There are absolutely players who have stated things that alter established lore and argue when I correct them.

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Sure, that can happen in any game, but the answer isn’t for the DM to do a lot of extra work. It’s for the table to pause the game and have a discussion about what’s going on in the fiction, so everyone’s on something like the same page, because until they are, the game cannot proceed functionally. Once that has taken place, the player can make an action declaration that makes sense within the context of what the table agrees is the established fiction. I wouldn’t consider this process part of gameplay per se but rather a reestablishment of that part of the social contract that governs “this is what we’ve all agreed to imagine together”. It’s also why I don’t think examples of such breakdowns in the social contract are a valid criticism of rules-text like the background features, because you need an intact social contract before you can proceed to play the game. It isn’t the features’ fault if participants in your or my game aren’t on the same page about what the established fiction is.

Oofta said:

In addition, D&D is not a narrative game by default. You can let the players declare what they want, it's not the default assumption for the game and never has been.

The latter is what you simply don't seem to want to acknowledge. I don't care how you run your game, if it works for you and your group fantastic. But the default assumption of D&D is that the players are 100% responsible for what their PCs think, feel and decide. The DM is 100% responsible for the world the PCs inhabit and all the NPCs therein. Of course, DMs have always worked with players on their backstory and adding elements that way. But player declarations determining the world in game is not the standard approach. I happen to prefer it no matter which side of the DM screen I'm on.

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I'm not sure what you mean by "narrative game", but from what you're saying here it seems you mean a game in which players are allowed to declare actions for their characters that play some part in "determining the world". It's simply not true that this isn't a "default assumption for the game", assuming you mean D&D. In a game of D&D, if I as a player declare an action for my PC to attack the orc with my PC's sword with the goal of making the orc dead, and the action succeeds, it is my action declaration that determined the world now contains a dead orc. You also state the player (and not the DM) is "100% responsible" for what their PC thinks. So why, when the player says their PC thinks a ship with which they're familiar (the Comox) frequents this harbor, are you, the DM, telling them they're mistaken? At the very least, this means the player is playing a character with faulty recollections, which is probably not the player's intention, and, even worse, implies the DM is more of an authority about what the PC thinks than the player, which steps all over the notion the player is responsible for that aspect of roleplaying their character. It's not surprising, from your earlier posts, that you seem to favor scenarios in which the PCs are in completely unfamiliar territory, as this would seem to support the players playing their PCs as people who don't know anything, which I think is the natural outcome of having to ask the DM if it's okay for your PC to know something. Lastly, I think it's a bit ironic, in a thread where I believe you've accused me of exhibiting one-true-way-ism, that you're telling me that "the default assumption" and "standard approach" for D&D has never supported players contributing to the fiction outside of merely animating their characters. I mean, the background features were published in 2014, so at least at that time it was the default, wasn't it?

Hriston said:

Sure, that can happen in any game, but the answer isn’t for the DM to do a lot of extra work. It’s for the table to pause the game and have a discussion about what’s going on in the fiction, so everyone’s on something like the same page, because until they are, the game cannot proceed functionally. Once that has taken place, the player can make an action declaration that makes sense within the context of what the table agrees is the established fiction. I wouldn’t consider this process part of gameplay per se but rather a reestablishment of that part of the social contract that governs “this is what we’ve all agreed to imagine together”. It’s also why I don’t think examples of such breakdowns in the social contract are a valid criticism of rules-text like the background features, because you need an intact social contract before you can proceed to play the game. It isn’t the features’ fault if participants in your or my game aren’t on the same page about what the established fiction is.


I'm not sure what you mean by "narrative game", but from what you're saying here it seems you mean a game in which players are allowed to declare actions for their characters that play some part in "determining the world". It's simply not true that this isn't a "default assumption for the game", assuming you mean D&D. In a game of D&D, if I as a player declare an action for my PC to attack the orc with my PC's sword with the goal of making the orc dead, and the action succeeds, it is my action declaration that determined the world now contains a dead orc. You also state the player (and not the DM) is "100% responsible" for what their PC thinks. So why, when the player says their PC thinks a ship with which they're familiar (the Comox) frequents this harbor, are you, the DM, telling them they're mistaken? At the very least, this means the player is playing a character with faulty recollections, which is probably not the player's intention, and, even worse, implies the DM is more of an authority about what the PC thinks than the player, which steps all over the notion the player is responsible for that aspect of roleplaying their character. It's not surprising, from your earlier posts, that you seem to favor scenarios in which the PCs are in completely unfamiliar territory, as this would seem to support the players playing their PCs as people who don't know anything, which I think is the natural outcome of having to ask the DM if it's okay for your PC to know something. Lastly, I think it's a bit ironic, in a thread where I believe you've accused me of exhibiting one-true-way-ism, that you're telling me that "the default assumption" and "standard approach" for D&D has never supported players contributing to the fiction outside of merely animating their characters. I mean, the background features were published in 2014, so at least at that time it was the default, wasn't it?

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I'm simply discussing the standard guidance of how D&D works and how I run my game. In D&D the player is responsible for their PC and the DM is responsible for everything else.

As always, run your game however it makes sense to you. No amount of typing on your part is going to change my opinion or the guidance given repeatedly in the books.

soviet said:

You would boot someone out of your game rather than allow them to use a printed ability that says they can make friends with other sailors?

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No. I would boot them for being an inconsiderate jerk and insisting things must be their way or the highway.

I might be pages behind on the sailor background discussion but after reading the entry, and DMd for the last 35 years, I don’t think a sailor on the sword coast that crew and player never visited as part of the player back story, that are now at the moonsea could just get a free ride to another port. Sure you might look the part of a sailor and they may be some great story telling back and forth as the captain says tie a knot, skills check or rig the main sail, skill check etc but in that case the results play into the free passage (working while sailing) but not just walking up and going we get on the next ship to Suzail free of charge. Maybe I missed a lot of thread back and forth but that’s my hot take

mamba said:

but the corner cases are great at showing where the problems are… either something always works, or it does not. Once that is decided then maybe there is a point to looking into the limits, until then… not so much

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These are rules for playing an actual game. If a problem doesn't arise in actual gameplay, then a problem doesn't exist.

EthanSental said:

I might be pages behind on the sailor background discussion but after reading the entry, and DMd for the last 35 years, I don’t think a sailor on the sword coast that crew and player never visited as part of the player back story, that are now at the moonsea could just get a free ride to another port. Sure you might look the part of a sailor and they may be some great story telling back and forth as the captain says tie a knot, skills check or rig the main sail, skill check etc but in that case the results play into the free passage (working while sailing) but not just walking up and going we get on the next ship to Suzail free of charge. Maybe I missed a lot of thread back and forth but that’s my hot take

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I can pretty much sum it all up as two sides. Those that agree with you because it would be illogical for it to work and those that disagree because the text is all that matters.