Emerikol
Legend
Well I can scratch burning wheel off my list of games. Not that I was seriously looking into it anyway.
D&D 5E Changes in Interpretation
- Thread starter Hussar
- Start date
Well I can scratch burning wheel off my list of games. Not that I was seriously looking into it anyway.
Well, I think a lot of indie games-especially, several of the narrativist "story" games are built for
a. players that don't trust the GM
b. players that like to DM, but don't want to give up that control as a player.
The Shadow
Hero
Hmmm. While you have a point about monster-building, on the whole I'd say AD&D was much more obsessed with getting things physically 'right' than any other edition.
Weapon speed rules. Weapon vs. armor tables. Loads of other fiddly combat rules. The list goes on and on. Even demihuman level limits were given a justification in terms of 'realism'.
Frankly, Gygax was if anything a little too concerned with physics, at least to my taste.
I am mixed. I don't want non humanoid monsters having feats an skills per hit die or, in general, even classes (I remember seeing a Leucrotta monk somewhere and thought it was lame). The MM should should just give them what they need including templates as appropriate.
However, I do like orcs, kobolds, and other humanoids to use classes and the same rules as the base, but I am also cool with DMs in 3e eyeballing skills and saying, "That is close enough" rather than worrying if they got the exact number right or making slight tweaks (maybe, the creature has a special template or is a variant race, the characters don't know).
The Shadow
Hero
Hmm. Having played and enjoyed a number of these games, I don't think this is quite fair. They really are trying to do something very different than a game like D&D.
In a narrativist game, one of the key ideas is narrative control. The players need to be able to shape the story, or dare I say, the narrative. The rules define who, at any given moment, is doing the shaping. The GM often is that person, but by no means always. (And I might add that not all narrativist games even HAVE a GM. It takes some tricky design, but it can be done.)
A D&D-like GM would defeat the whole point of a narrativist game. It really has very little to do with trust, and everything to do with what the game is trying to accomplish.
I love playing D&D and games like it, but they scratch a very different sort of itch than narrative games like Prime Time Adventures or Capes or Universalis.
In PTA, you're almost more like a creative team writing a TV series together than anything else. (The GM is actually called 'the Producer'.) You do each have your own character, and you do play them in-character at times... but in between it's both appropriate and expected for other players to suggest ideas about where the plot is going, what the scene setting and background music is like, even how your character should deliver his lines.
I once had my character give an ominous speech, and another player said, "Oooh! No, wait, he should say it THIS way!" And I said, "Wow! That's even better!" and did the speech over again. (I should add that I didn't have to. But in PTA, it was totally acceptable for her to suggest it, and for me to take the suggestion.)
It sounds crazy from the perspective of playing D&D, I know. These really are an entirely different class of games, in which the GM plays an entirely different role. I find them deeply enjoyable, but as I said, in a completely different way than how I enjoy D&D.
Oh, I know they are different. And, I was not stating that all narrativist games were based on player distrust or GMs not wanting to give up control as players. However, from spending a lot of time at RPG.net, there are many players for whom the above is true as they have outright stated it.
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Lord Mhoram
Hero
Yeah. Burning Wheel was just the most obvious example of that kind of thing I could think of.
Ratskinner
Adventurer
Just to point out the obvious, the whole purpose of playing many of the story games is to actually, y'know, tell a story....together. Most of them shift a lot of creative burden away from a central "GM" simply because that's the point. Trusting or Distrusting the person who would have been GM simply doesn't enter into it. This is especially obvious in that some story games don't even have a GM or similar figure with final narrative authority (that authority is often the subject of the gameplay itself.)
D&D, despite being the first ttrpg, really doesn't address story/Narrativist issues very well in any of its editions. It varies between being Gamist (competing against the DM/dungeon) and Simulationist (living out a fantasy career). Generally speaking, whatever story or "fluff" elements we paint over the game are just that, painted on.
When people play D&D in a heavily "story" manner, they are usually doing a lot of relatively freeform roleplaying or storytelling that occasionally falls back to D&D for combat or an inspirational attribute/skill check as well as "color" for the setting of the story. D&D generally doesn't do anything to inhibit such creative endeavors, but it rarely does anything to add to the experience.
Plus...what Shadow said above.
Maybe you are all thinking of a different game - Burning Wheel relies heavily on GM authority to (i) frame scenes, and (ii) adjudicate the consequences of action resolution, particularly failures.
The only rule in BW that comes even close to what Lord Mhoram describes here is that, if a player declares an intent and task for his/her PC, and the relevant skill or ability check succeeds, then the GM must abide by the result of the check. That is no different from any other system in which the GM is not empowered just to disregard the action resolution mechanics (ie in my book, any decent system).
This has nothing to do with "trusting the GM". It's about whether or not the GM is to enjoy a degree of force over action resolution, and hence the direction of the game, that reduces the input of the players to being the GM's advisory committee. 2nd ed AD&D flirts with this approach; so does White Wolf, via the "golden rule"; I regard it as the most dysfunctional approach to roleplaying around.
Given that it's a gritty system with a reasonably high degree of process simulation in its PC build rules and encounter building mechanics, and moderately process simulation in its action resolution (more than 4e, less than RuneQuest), I would think that you might actually like it, based on the preferences you evince in your posts.
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I think pre-4e D&D actually does a lot to inhibit narrativist play: too much fiddly, exploration-focused action resolution (eg 1 min/level and 10 min/level spell durations) that get in the way of clean scene framing and push in the direction of unstructured task resolution rather than conflict resolution. D&D combat has always been conflict resolution in a mechanical sense, but has not always been the best vehicle for introducing and addressing fictional stakes.
To overcome these problems, as you hint at in your post (or seem to, to me), requires a signficant suspension of the action resolution mechanics. Which, at least traditionally, is a privilege conferred only on the GM. Which means that the game comes to depend very heavily on GM force, not only in scene framing but at every point of action resolution. Which is pretty inimical to narrativist play, I think.
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