You're doing what? Surprising the DM

[Campbell]

Everyone remember when Celebrim complained that we are all basically the same? Did not buy it then. Still don't buy it.

We just see things in an incredibly different light. I would like to communicate how I run games with N'raac, but I just don't see it doing any good. We speak different languages. Posting on EN World often feels like I'm living in a foreign country. I was convinced of that when the cancellation of Marvel Heroic Roleplay barely warranted a mention on the front page. Honestly sometimes I wonder if I'm on the right forum.

I see people who do not even make the attempt as to why 4e is so appealing to some of us. I feel like I've been blamed for my preferences rather than interacted with. I honestly don't see the point anymore. I want to believe in this place. I've been here too long to not believe. Still, I'm beginning to lose patience with those who use mitigating speech whenever my preferences are brought up.

We are real people with real preferences. It's time people get over it.

 

[pemerton]

Everyone remember when Celebrim complained that we are all basically the same? Did not buy it then. Still don't buy it.

I agree with this. Besides all the other points I made at the time, there are his comments in the current "Innerdudeian case study" thread about encouraging his players towards in-character-only talk at the table.

Posting on EN World often feels like I'm living in a foreign country. I was convinced of that when the cancellation of Marvel Heroic Roleplay barely warranted a mention on the front page. Honestly sometimes I wonder if I'm on the right forum.

I missed the post about MHRP here, but that's because I typically load ENworld and click straight through to my notifications. I saw the thread(s) on rpg.net, though, and went to DriveThruRPG to complete my collection of PDFs.

On the broader issue of "a foreign country", I fluctuate. Sometimes I feel like the way I run my game must be pretty typical - there's nothing special or hypertheoretical about it, it's just an approach I gradually worked out for myself and over the past several years have got some help with from a bunch of different sources (The Forge, BW, HW/Q, etc). But then I find myself in threads like this having really bizarre experiences. Or on the current paladin thread where people seem to assume that the only way, in play, to avoid paladins burning down orphanages is to have a GM-enforced code.

Three particularly odd recurring assumptions in this thread are:

• that use of a story element = framing of a scene - whereas I see these as completely different (nouns don't entail verbs, would be one way of putting it), so that we can all agree at set-up that the game will feature roughly this-or-that range of story elements, but we have no real idea how it's all going to turn out;
  
  
• that (i) the players engaging a situation to get more info from the GM about the backstory is not functionally different from (ii) the players engaging a situation to try and change the ingame fiction, and hence their PC's fictional positioning - whereas to me this marks a crucial difference between (a) encountering some refugees in the desert and wondering what is going on, and (b) encountering the siege around the city and wondering how it is going to change the dynamics of interacting with the city;
  
  
• that being surprised in an RPG depends upon the GM having sole control over backstory and introduction of story elements - this last assumption seem to me to be pretty closely related to the first two I've mentioned.

I honestly don't see the point anymore. I want to believe in this place. I've been here too long to not believe. Still, I'm beginning to lose patience

NOOOOO! First Neonchameleon, then CrazyJerome - not you too, Campbell!

I see people who do not even make the attempt as to why 4e is so appealing to some of us. I feel like I've been blamed for my preferences rather than interacted with.

<snip>

We are real people with real preferences. It's time people get over it.

This I'll agree with, though.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Or on the current paladin thread where people seem to assume that the only way, in play, to avoid paladins burning down orphanages is to have a GM-enforced code.

Who said this in that thread? I haven't seen it yet, but I haven't read the whole thing, and I'm a fairly decent addition to it. As always, play what you like

 

[JamesonCourage]

I feel like I've been blamed for my preferences rather than interacted with.

Well, I agree this happens with a few posters, but obviously our perception of how many will differ. But, not everyone who replies to you is going to skip listening to you, or your points. I hope you can see that in my recent click moment with Hussar in this thread.

I haven't seen enough of your posts to really make a judgement call for sure, but you seem like a reasonable poster (unlike a select, loud crowd from certain poles of the edition spectrum). Maybe a couple well-placed ignores, and interacting with more open-minded posters? I dunno. Just a shame to see you consider going; take this as a sign of encouragement from "the other side" in many respects (I assume). As always, play what you like

Edit: I think this is me using Inspiring Word?

 

[N'raac]

N'raac, think about this. Are people sometimes - often, even - able to work out other things that they will do together - like going to movies, or cooking and eating dinner, or choosing a colour of carpet for the loungeroom? All the strategies that are used to achieve coordination, consensus and buy-in in those cases are available to a GM who wants to make sure that s/he presents scenarios that will enjoy player buy in.

Of course they are. Larger groups are able to decide how to run huge organizations. They do not, in my experience, incorporate the premise that everyone has a veto power.

It need not be. As Hussar explained, simply by presenting the choice, and having the players (perhaps in character, perhaps out of character, perhaps a bit of both) debate it, can be a way of generating buy-in to whichever it is that the players opt for. Had they opted for the desert they might now have buy in.

I suspect it is at least equally likely that Hussar now has no buyin for either desert or toil in Genenna, and the GM is at fault for presenting multiple unacceptable approaches. In the initial posts, I thought it was pretty clear that his position was "city now - that is what we are invested in". Then he became accepting of "siege delays city", and now, it seems, of "choose between desert or Gehenna delaying city". I'm unclear what happens if we get a couple of players now invested in each of Gehenna and the Desert, with one invested only in the City.

As with Hussar, I am a bit confused by the example. Has the GM already decided that these nomads will attack on sight? In that case it's a pointless roadblock. Or are the nomads just a variant on the siege already discussed at some length? In which case making them nomads makes no difference that I can see, unless the GM is hoping to use the nomad besiegers as a way to try and lure the players back into engaging with the desert (which is the sort of technique that @chaochou discussed way upthread).

I'm curious how/why you interpret "deter" as "attack on sight". Howwever, I think all my example has done is back the thread up 50+ pages to "if it is in the desert, it is not possible for it to be relevant". So we're back to geography - if I move the geographical location of the siege from "immediately outside the city" to "in the desert", it is no longer acceptable.

It just baffles me that you say this. We've debated the siege at some length - that is unexpected by the players. Suppose the players find the leaders of the siege, hoping to bargain with them - and the leaders turn out to be XYZ from the characters' past - that was unexpected!

Im seeing a lot of "I want the one specific thing I am invested in right now", and not a lot of "jumble up the elements and surprise me", in much of the discussion. I don't think XYZ from the characters' past showing up for a Grell-killing position, for example, would have gone over that well.

But I suspect a lot of difference exists between the polar-appearing positions expressed early on and the actual play at the table - Hussar's recent comments on normally just going along with the GM's plot, even though he's not really invested in it, differ considerably from "any delay of Grellquest or City Arrival is wholly unacceptable". I'm starting to sense a bit of a linear focus - "once the specific plotline is embarked on, nothing extraneous should interfere until it is resolved" is kind of the vibe I am now sensing from Hussar. Whereas I'm still good with multiple plots intertwining - but there comes a point where the focus is on resolving one plot, and a player so focused logically may not appreciate any distractions from that shorter term goal.

 

[chaochou]

First Neonchameleon, then CrazyJerome - not you too, Campbell!

CJ left? If so, that's a pity. He was sharp.

 

[sheadunne]

I feel like I'm back in one my college literature courses.
[MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION] arguing only with the words written, the exact example, rather than seeing the deeper meaning of the text.
[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] arguing bigger ideas, while not playing close enough attention that his examples may cause confusion.

This is usually a result of N vs S and often drags out conversations that don't particularly have any reason to continue.

Everyone else is just trying to bridge the gaps.

Sigh.
[MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION], [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION], and a few others. Don't lose hope. Your contributions to this thread have helped me continue to shape my own gaming preferences. While I fall more toward the other side in most of my gaming experience, I have found your discussion points sound and often compelling, especially as a reflection on past games I have played and why at points it felt lacking in some regards. Your voices are needed and I might even argue, required if we as a community want to have good conversations about gaming and all that entails.

 

[Ratskinner]

On the broader issue of "a foreign country", I fluctuate. Sometimes I feel like the way I run my game must be pretty typical - there's nothing special or hypertheoretical about it, it's just an approach I gradually worked out for myself and over the past several years have got some help with from a bunch of different sources (The Forge, BW, HW/Q, etc). But then I find myself in threads like this having really bizarre experiences. Or on the current paladin thread where people seem to assume that the only way, in play, to avoid paladins burning down orphanages is to have a GM-enforced code.

I went through all my shocks like this several years ago outside the internet as well as on it. I "lost" all my arguments about where D&D should go when 3e came out, and again when 4e came out. For a long while, I thought people just must not understand what I'm saying. However, I've come to believe that my preferred style just isn't that popular (at least amongst those that come to rpg-ers through D&D). Nowadays I think D&D really just has too much baggage to be the game I'd like it to be. Fortunately, I'm not extremely picky, and will play in many different modes (or I'd probably not get to play much of anything.) Unfortunately, that means I have to pay at least peripheral attention to what D&D is doing since it (or its scion PF) is the dominant game in my local market.

I do hope and wish that 5e will explicitly address all these playstyle differences with both rules modules and directly in the DM/player advice, rather than the facile advice we get about different player personalities combined with the tacit assumption that either the designers or you already know the "right" way to play D&D. IMO, WotC's failure to do so in 4e was the proximate cause of the edition wars. Even if the game gives you the tools to address it all, a lack of cogent advice will just doom a lot of groups to frustrating play.

 

[N'raac]

I went through all my shocks like this several years ago outside the internet as well as on it. I "lost" all my arguments about where D&D should go when 3e came out, and again when 4e came out. For a long while, I thought people just must not understand what I'm saying. However, I've come to believe that my preferred style just isn't that popular (at least amongst those that come to rpg-ers through D&D). Nowadays I think D&D really just has too much baggage to be the game I'd like it to be. Fortunately, I'm not extremely picky, and will play in many different modes (or I'd probably not get to play much of anything.) Unfortunately, that means I have to pay at least peripheral attention to what D&D is doing since it (or its scion PF) is the dominant game in my local market.

I assume by "local market", you mean Planet Earth, or something similar.

I do hope and wish that 5e will explicitly address all these playstyle differences with both rules modules and directly in the DM/player advice, rather than the facile advice we get about different player personalities combined with the tacit assumption that either the designers or you already know the "right" way to play D&D. IMO, WotC's failure to do so in 4e was the proximate cause of the edition wars. Even if the game gives you the tools to address it all, a lack of cogent advice will just doom a lot of groups to frustrating play.

I think 5e (and a lot of other games) could do a much better job of explicitly stating the design objectives. Different games seek to achieve different results, and much of the Edition Wars (or System Wars) boil down to the mesh of the system with the group's play objectives. The game system may well deliver exactly what it set out to deliver, efectively and elegantly. I'd classify that as a well designed game. But, if what it set out to deliver is a poor match to the game experience I, or my group, wants, it is a very well designed system that I don't want to play as it does not deliver, or set out to deliver, what I want in a game.

If 5e tries to be all things to all people, I expect it will, at best, deliver marginal results across the board. It will do many things, likely passably and maybe some quite well, but it won't do any of them as well as a system focused on delivery of that type of gaming experience, and not trying (or pretending) to be all things to all gamers.

I think 3e and 4e (with limited experience regarding the latter) are both good, solid games. They are both, however, different games from their predecessor editions. I would classify 3.5 and Pathfinder as "edition" of the same game as 3.0, but I would classify 2e and 4e as different games, not different editions of the same game.

 

[Celebrim]

...there are his comments in the current "Innerdudeian case study" thread about encouraging his players towards in-character-only talk at the table.

The reason that I've largely given up on this thread is that not only have I given up on being understood, but I've given up believing that I'm being defamed as a result of a misunderstanding.

My comments in that other thread are intended to deal with a very specific situation, a situation which - I might add, I was called out by Innerdude as having a somewhat penetrating insight into. It is however not a general rule I have advanced there or anywhere else that all table talk should be IC (though a surprising number of problems are solved by first addressing them in the fiction and understanding them through the fiction rather than turning them into personal conflicts between people). For example, in the case we are discussing in this thread where Hussar wants to hand wave a scene he (as a player) is not interested in, I specifically said that since that is a player issue (as opposed to a character issue) that involved process of play it would be better to address it OOC rather than IC with some sort of 'signal'. Clearly since I've stated that repeatedly then I'm not opposed to OOC negotiation or talk, and I think I've made that too bloody well obvious to be misunderstood except willfully. Obviously, there are going to be complicated things which are both character and player issues (ex "It may be right for your character but it makes me the player uncomfortable") and that requires senstive and complicated handling, but as a general rule what I'm advancing is that character issues should be dealt with IC and player issues should generally be deal with OOC. If that isn't what you do, and it works for you, then I'm fine with that. But what I have been responding to has not been posts about how 'What I'm doing is working perfectly for me', but giving pragmatic advice when clearly some approach wasn't working perfectly (in Hussar's case the DM's temper flared, possibly Hussar's temper flared, and he soon after left the game).

Three particularly odd recurring assumptions in this thread are:

• that use of a story element = framing of a scene - whereas I see these as completely different (nouns don't entail verbs, would be one way of putting it), so that we can all agree at set-up that the game will feature roughly this-or-that range of story elements, but we have no real idea how it's all going to turn out;

• 
  
  I'm not even entirely sure what you mean by that. What does 'use of a story element' mean here? I'm often feeling like I'm arguing with Humpty Dumpty here, in that by 'framing of a scene', you don't mean 'framing of a scene' but rather 'framing of a scene as I use the term' which as far as I can tell isn't even how FORGE uses the term but some special pemertonian meaning. I'm sure this makes sense in your head, but I don't get either what you are trying to say or why you see this as a reoccuring assumption. I think I've proved repeatedly though this thread that I can 'frame a scene' and specifically 'frame a scene' in such a way as to heighten dramatic tension and address character backstory and goals (if you don't do those things, its still 'scene framing' its just not a particular sort of highly desirable scene framing, for example with both seem to agree that you can frame a 'transition scene'). Explain now what you mean by 'use a story element'.
  
  

  [*]that (i) the players engaging a situation to get more info from the GM about the backstory is not functionally different from (ii) the players engaging a situation to try and change the ingame fiction

  
  Wait? That's a common assumption? Where? Who here has suggested player agency is different from no player agency? Who here has suggested proposition is different than inquiry? For that matter the phrase 'try and change the ingame fiction' is a ludicrously broad phrase that covers all sorts of things, from engaging the fiction through process to changing the fiction outright through authority over story. What do you mean other than 'badwrongfun' when you declare you've found this assumption that bears as far as I can tell no relationship at all to my thoughts?
  
  

  and hence their PC's fictional positioning

  
  'fictional positioning'? [sarcasm]Could you perhaps use a broader and more generic concept?[/sarcasm]. I know what 'fictional posititioning' is, I just have no idea what it has to do with what you are trying to say, or how the examples you are citing actually change the players idea of their fictional positioning. My idea of fictional positioning is something like, "I'm on the back of a monstrous centipede in the Abyss, and I'm holding a barrel of tar and feather duster. (What can I use this tar for?)"
  
  

  - whereas to me this marks a crucial difference between (a) encountering some refugees in the desert and wondering what is going on, and (b) encountering the siege around the city and wondering how it is going to change the dynamics of interacting with the city;

  
  Is 'wondering how it is going to change the dynamics of interacting with the city' really all that different than 'wondering what is going on'? Either way, the players now must deal with your complication, gain information about the scene you've framed, and figure out how to resolve it. Explain what this 'crucial difference' is, please. I would see it as a crucial difference if you didn't have to "deal with your complication, gain information about the scene you've framed, and figure out how to resolve it" but instead could simply reframe the fiction. I don't see the crucial difference you see. Maybe it's there, but in 30 pages or more, you've not explained it in a way I can understand.
  
  If the game allows for, "Player #1: However, disease has broken out in the camp. Morale is low. It's clear the besiegers are weary of the seige. Even as we observe them, we see them breaking camp and leaving.", this is a marked difference and shows that the game has put real scene framing and possibly even setting backstory authority into the hands of a player. However, I don't see anyone suggesting how such a game could be easily adopted to D&D given that D&D has no mechanics for negotiating story authority between the participants nor do I see anyone emphaticly suggesting that as a general rule they run their game that way. In fact, Hussar has firmly suggested otherwise - that such player initiated scene reframing to handwave a complication be an extraordinary rather than reutine event, and you've provided no examples of this actually happening in your games much less reutinely. Continually calling black 'white' won't make it so.
  
  

  [*]that being surprised in an RPG depends upon the GM having sole control over backstory and introduction of story elements

  
  Depends I guess on what you mean by 'being surprised', since so much of this seems to evolved to arguments over the meaning of words. I certainly agree that if the GM doesn't have sole control over backstory and introduction of story elements, he can still be surprised. Those elements could be and often are surprising. On the other hand, I don't see a lot of evidence of anyone in this thread giving players more control over backstory and story elements than is generally common in my experience. Certainly no one here is suggesting that the players create the seige and its backstory, and the essay you keep linking to actually advocates against doing that very thing ('niave conch passing'). Even the sort of play which I agreed was different than the way I'd play it*, the poster was not not leaving the introduction of story elements to the players, merely creating a scene with story elements of his own devising in response to percieved player interest (genericly, in a 'chase scene'). I'm pretty sure the way play is constructed at his table is not, "Wouldn't it be cool if I was chased by wild dogs.", although of course you could play a game that way and it would be perfectly valid and would work albiet you'd probably need to invent a framework for controlling the conch because one doesn't exist in D&D in any edition.
  
  My assumption here is quite different than you seem to think it is. My assumption here is you keep thumping this hammer about 'GM having sole control over backstory and introduction of story elements' and throwing around terms like 'scene framing' but you don't even know what you are talking about. It's just a good thumping point for hitting people with if they disagree with you, that is suitably 'big picture' that it evades any specific criticism and suitably 'trendy' that it makes one feel good about themselves to say it. It really isn't the central issue in this thread or any of the examples therein. No one for example has suggested that it would be perfectly reasonable for Hussar to invent a hitherto unnoted in the fiction Gold Dragon ally to incinerate the Grell, nor for Hussar to invent a hitherto unnoted ring of wishes to wish his way across the desert. For some styles of play, that's perfectly valid and interesting and for some games the player is empowered to do things just like that without expectation of GM overruling him - but not for any actually relevant to this discussion.
  
  Here's the thing; what I don't think you can integrate into this mental model of me successfully is that in the specific 'centipede' example, I've already said (once I got all the details clear) that had I been the DM, and had I been running that particular adventure, and had Hussar's binder been able to summon a centipede mount, that I would have brushed across the organic wastes in 5-10 minutes of play and arrived at the crumbling Cathedral with no additional complication, and further that not only would I have 'allowed' Hussar to do it but that I would have been happy about the prospect. That fact just completely destroys this fictional Celebrim you find so useful, you keep bringing him into the conversation long after the real Celebrim has been any sort of regular part of it. Please refrain in the future from confusing fictional Celebrim and the assumptions you've invented about him with real Celebrim. As usual, if you find an assumption 'odd' or 'illogical', chances are its because the other person doesn't hold it. Thanks.