Even in a shared fiction troupe style play like Ars Magica there is one player GMing at any given moment and he may or may not run things the same way as anyone else.
Sure, but I think [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] was talking about games where
players are specifically given rights to add things to the background and to the game world. By mentioning a guild or syndicate that they belong(ed) to in the pre-game, they make that organisation a reality in the game world. By picking up the bottle on the tavern table, they make a bottle appear that didn't (explicitly) exist before.
If he has an idea for a faerie protagonist then the fae in question may suddenly develop plot armour against the spell that worked fine the last three times they met him. If the GM doesn't suck there will be an in world explanation for the change from "He borrowed an amulet from Mab" to "It's walpurgis night" to "He found true love" but the fact remains that it is perfectly legitimate to suddenly change the rules of the game as the PCs experience it from one GM to the next within the course of a single game. The PCs may or may not ever be able to find out why.
Hell's bells, this would only ever be acceptable to me if it
did have a fictional "explanation". Changing the fiction (as DM) is fine, but changing the rules (except explicitly and with prior notice) is not. As a player, if such a thing has changed, I expect there to be an in-fiction explanation there if I look for it.
Hell, reality works that way too, or have you never seen a strong man fail a strength check to open a pickle jar only to see his aged mother make the roll?
You said it yourself - there is randomness in the dice, and sometimes one rolls low while another rolls high. Did you hear the dice rattle?
What I think is interesting is that it's the basis for a discussion amongst the whole group on some key playstyle issues before the game actually starts.
The discussions used to decide on modules may be as important as the modules themselves.
This is a great observation, although, for us, it applies just as much to decisions about which system to use/play. I think this is pretty natural, since the modules seem likely to make D&DN a set of related games, rather than one unitary one.
Possible, but as D&D is a game that has always tried to represent reality, I find it odd that any of those people would come here.
LOL. I think lots of people (me included) have wasted a lot of time trying fruitlessly (and pointlessly, it currently seems to me) to "force-fit" elements of the real world to D&D.
This is a list of quibbling around the edges.
The way death, dying and recovery work is "quibbling at the edges"?? Mmmkay...
But in the vast majority of cases, if you want to know how things work in D&D land, they work how they do here.
Except that, in the cases where the rules actually cover, they don't. I can see that this is a "natural" assumption, and I can see that having a good number of world assumptions that are familiar to the players is very helpful, but I think that building on the assumption that the model for all situations not explicitly covered by the rules should be "real life" is flawed in a very pernicious way.
The problem is that, outside the very obvious (colour of the sky, gravity pulling towards the ground, etc.), we all tend to have different models of "how the world works" when we get down to specifics. Some of the differences are subtle, some are very marked. Where we have specific knowledge, the model may be more accurate (although, to be serious, how many times have you used physics or chemistry equations to work out a result?), but the model will always be arbitrary to an extent.
Given that the model must be arbitrary, I think it is infinitely better if it is at least
shared. This means that the questions and situations that commonly crop up should be covered by "rules" that are accessible to all parties in the game. The rules need not be immensely voluminous -
some measure of shared understanding
can be assumed - but around what the PCs can commonly do I think they need to be clear and reasonably precise.
I'd call this a feature, not a bug. An RPG is a lot more fun to me if I'm making my character's decisions on the basis of the game-fiction rather than knowledge of the mechanics.
But how do you really know the game fiction, other than via the mechanics? The only other resource I see used a lot is your understanding of the "real world" - and this varies between each of us and is invariably inaccurate in ways that a myriad of books are available to point out to us.
That said, I don't think greater dependence on DM rulings will have that effect. IME one quickly gets a feel for how a DM rules and can make decisions on that basis.
This is my point, yes; even "DM fiat" will follow a set of rules. Far better, in my opinion, if those rules are explicitly shared than if they exist as some sort of hazy mish-mash in someone's mind.
I don't get the "20 questions" objection either. The DM is always the players' source of information about the world, whatever the rule system is.
Yes, of course - but if the DM is the source not only of what events and circumstances are evident to the player characters in the fiction, but also of how the game world works and what the characters risks and chances might be in interacting with that fiction, then the number of questions baloons.
My issue is that of the first. That if the rules work, why would you need to set them aside? And if they don't work and you have to fix them with rulings, why not find rules that do work?
Imagine if a DM is good enough to fix broken rules through rulings, how much better the game could be with working rules and the DM's time and attention focused on the content of the sessions.
Sure, I see this, too. I think it relates to two "aspects" of "DM fiat" - ignoring or changing existing rules on the one hand, and making up rules where none exist on the other. While the latter is inevitably required to some extent - and the former is often desired by the player group - I don't see either as being the least bit desirable
as a design aim.
This is what I find deeply disturbing, here. Mike Mearls is not saying that these things are inevitable and some explanation of the rules and design principles would therefore be useful for DMs to support those (hopefully limited) times they will need to make rulings on the game world "physics" - he's saying that these rulings are to be encouraged and sought out as a design aim. If that is true, the logical end-point is that there be no rules at all! I know that's "reductio ad absurdam", but I think it really does show that the principle is of, at the very best, limited usefulness.
