D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Lanefan]

3) I ran a 7 year, high resolution metaplot/backstory, full-on Setting Tourism game set in FR from late 2e through 2004 with 3.x; full Sim/Immersionist. Even in that game, with high resolution setting and metaplot, there was an unfathomable swathe of setting that had absolutely nothing to do with our play and almost surely never would. But I didn't think of that "unfathomable amount of setting that will never see play as "a grey featureless blob" or a "colorful, featureful blob." It was irrelevant. It didn't matter so it didn't exist in my mind, my imaginings, etc.

Ah, that points to one difference between us, then: to me the parts of the setting that haven't seen (and likely won't see) play are not irrelevant, and still do exist in my mind, imaginings, etc. - even when it's not my setting!

When I look at the maps of my own setting or of the one I play in (both are homebrew), I sometimes look at areas that have never seen play and imagine what might be there. Obviously, for my own setting I can take those imaginings and turn them into something more; while with the other DM's setting it's more of a fanciful guessing game as to whether what I imagine being there is what actually will be there if-when we ever visit.

In either case, it's not like those areas don't exist in my mind.

 

[Lanefan]

It does highlight another issue I have with many of these kinds of games, though. They have a real tendency to find new, cute names for game mechanics, in a way that to my mind brings neither clarity nor any other value. I guess they're trying to be pithy and memorable, but it doesn't work for me.

Meh - I don't begrudge a game trying to carve an identity for itself by using terms in an unusual way or even inventing whole new words for things, assuming those terms or words are clearly defined up front in the game materials and then used consistently.

I mean, look at "tapping" a card. As far as I know Magic: the Gathering came up with that term; and if it didn't it still sure took it mainstream. Now we see it as commonplace, but it wasn't always.

 

[Lanefan]

What shoe size is Aragorn the Ranger and King? I don't know. I don't know of any writing by JRRT that even canvasses this. (Cf, for instance, the obsession with feet in the Cinderella fairy tale.)

But I wouldn't therefore say that Aragorn's feet, and their size, appear like a grey featureless blob. I'd just say that I don't know much about them, which is the result of no one having authored that fiction.

However, the fact that Aragorn is walking around without difficulty implies that he has feet, and does so strongly enough that we can take it as a given. (in the movies his feet appear in numerous scenes and shots, even more firmly establishing their existence )

We don't know and aren't told, however, excatly what Aragorn did on May 17th in the tenth year before he first met Frodo. We simply have to assume as a given that he in fact lived through that day, and go from there.

Same as in the real world I've no idea what you, pemerton, did on March 25th 1998*; but I've every reason to believe you were alive then, lived through that day, and carried on.

There's a whole lot of things that can be implied strongly enough to push back the boundaries of the "featureless gray blob" a very long way. (that said, I should probably note here that I have a long-standing off-plane "otherworld" that is, for the most part, an almost-featureless gray blob other than an abandoned city, a stagnant river, and a petrified forest, all of which are covered in gray dust the colour of which is nigh indistinguishable from the gray clouds above. Needless to say, the name of this place is Grayworld. Individual characters and sometimes whole parties occasionally end up here by accident e.g. a malfunctioning planeshift spell, much to their dismay.)

* - this is a random date pulled from thin air; on the off-chance it was somehow a significant day in your life, I did not intend to hit it.

 

[Lanefan]

@Faolyn , I hope this doesn’t come across as insulting, because I absolutely do not mean it as such. But either you are doing something very strange and/or possibly quite foolish, or you’re doing something creating massive confusion not just for involved people like @pemerton but many others, too.

It looks like you’re saying that when someone at a game table who isn’t the GM exerts authorial influence, it’s the character doing so. Not the player - you seem to explicitly deny that, to emphasize that it’s the character shaping the world beyond their capabilities as an inhabitant.

At which point I find myself going “WTF?” again and again. Do you to mean to do that? Do you regard player and character as indistinguishable, or character as such a prominent part of the player that it should be regarded as present when the player acts with regard to the game in any way, or anything like? What the hell is going on here?

You won't be like to get an answer from her as, sadly, she was booted from the thread about five pages back.

 

[pemerton]

The partial exception is slice-of-the-characters’-lives play in which the participants specifically don’t want anything dramatic, violent, etc.

One thing I personally enjoy about Burning Wheel is it supports this sort of thing being part of game play, because Duel of Wits works just as well for small things as big things, and there can still be stakes that require you to roll for that Obstacle 1 test.

(I'm thinking especially of the time that Thurgon had to talk Aramina around to agree to mend his armour.)

It may not be going all the way that you're thinking of - but for me it's quite different from the more 4-colourish tone of (say) 4e D&D or MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic.

 

[pemerton]

Because  you're choosing to roll those those dice to get the effect that authors the spellbook fiction. You're not choosing to roll dice for followers in AD&D; the game is generating that effect as a reaction to you reaching name level.

No I'm not. The GM is telling me to roll them. All I did was choose to look for spellbooks.

 

[pemerton]

I literally can't imagine how you see that explanation as incoherent.

Because it treats two sentences as synonymous which to me obviously are not. There's not even a translation schema I can apply to get from one to the other without literally sharing @Oofta's preferences!

 

[pemerton]

when you play as a player pemeton you don’t know everything about the setting, even if your character would know alot more than you you can’t truly speak for what they know because you don’t know what’s in the world, but the GM does

The bolded bit is false for every RPG I play except the occasional bit of dungeon crawling classic D&D.

 

[Autumnal]

I always push back against this mindset, mostly because while a screenwriter has to worry about run-time constraints a GM does not. RPGs are by nature open-ended in terms of how long they can go on; and so there's really no need to sacrifice anything on the altar of brevity. Instead, there's time to pull on all the threads and see what comes of it.

well, apart from participants’ attention, capacity for details, and enthusiasm. Those are at least half the reason I like Mamet’s rule of thumb.

 

[chaochou]

when you play as a player you don’t know everything about the setting, even if your character would know alot more than you you can’t truly speak for what they know because you don’t know what’s in the world, but the GM does

The above is false for every rpg I either play, or GM, with the exception of the occasional 4e game of collaboratively beating up monsters on a map.