D&D 5E Character play vs Player play

[aramis erak]

No, I disagree with your premise: these are not two types of games. Roleplaying games are storytelling games, storytelling games are roleplaying games. Because you don't like one particular style, you've decided that it belongs to a completely different category of games, but as far as I'm concerned it makes as much sense as pretending that action movies are not films because they're too different from the kind of cinema you like.

The distinction has a wide and fuzzy margin... but there are several key elements broadly held in the storygame side and almost never found in the Trad side of the margin.

The storygame side, players can narrate the actions of characters other than their own, and the mechanics are usually about either (a) who gets to talk when, or (b) how does the scene resolve.

On the trad side, players only narrate their own actions, and the mechanics are usually about "did I succeed at this action?"

Being dismissive of a real (and widening) gap does not service to anyone.

Examples for Scene Resolution include Fiasco and Mouseguard - one roll per scene, except for the climax.
Examples for Narrative Control include Houses of the Blooded, Blood & Honor, Fiasco

Examples for Trad: D&D, Traveller, Shadowrun, Dark Heresy...

Examples from the murky border: Any Fate System game, any of MWP's CortexPlus games (Smallville, Firefly, Marvel Heroic RP), Dying Earth RPG, Numenara.

Story happens either way, but how you get that story generated is a major part of it. Playing Houses of the blooded, the feel of play is totally unlike playing D&D, even tho' one could use the same setting in D&D with no major issues. In Houses, if I win the round with enough wagers, I can have your character lose and surrender, with you potentially having no recourse, and the GM, basically being just a player for all the NPCs, may or may not have enough wagers to make it less painful.

The gap, despite your claim it's meaningless, is huge, and many players (most, even) find the other side uncomfortable.

The label isn't a great label, but it's the label that has arisen, it has a fairly well understood meaning, and the nature of play is quite different, justifying the label.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

You're raising an interesting point, I'll have to think about it. Sorry if I sounded abrasive.

 

[KarinsDad]

I see this "escape from the cultists" example as quite different from the beard example. Because it involves action resolution - the GM (as part of the adjudication of the failed con) has framed the PC into a particuar situation, and the action the player has declared is "I flee!" Deciding whether or not the door is open is part of the resolutoin of that action - if it's shut, then presumably a STR or DEX or similar check is required to pull it open before the cultists swarm the PC.

I'm not 100% sure how I'd resolve this, but I might require an Athletics or Acrobatics check - if the check succeeds then the narration is of the PC slipping through the open door; if it fails the narration is of the PC failing to get the door open in time! Or I might allow the player to make a "luck" roll. Or I might stipulate the door as open or shut depending on my own preferences for difficulty, pacing etc.

But I do think it raises issues of a different kind from the beard example.

I agree that this can be a different issue.


Interestingly enough though, a lot of this is determined by my state of mind as DM at the time of the encounter.

If in my mind the door is open and the PC is far enough from opponents to just flee automatically, then it's closer to the beard example in that the player is dictating what is happening in the campaign world and I happen to agree.

If in my mind the door is closed, then it's action resolution as you state. The player is declaring what he wants the PC to be doing and after adjudicating how that resolution will be resolved (athletics check, random luck roll, whatever), dice are rolled and the encounter unfolds.


Btw, when I DM, I occasionally have what we call at our table "high is good for the party" roll. I select a player to roll a D20 with no modifiers. If the number is equal to or higher to a DC in my head, a specific good thing happens. If not, it doesn't. Sometimes a low enough roll means that a bad thing happens. But, it is totally random in the sense that somebody is rolling to determine an outcome outside the parameters of PC abilities.

As an example, a player will want to find a merchant in town who is has anti-venom potions for sale. I might set the DC for that at 8 or 10 or 12 depending on my frame of mind at the moment and a player will roll the dice. Other DMs might "just say yes" and allow it to happen automatically.

 

[KarinsDad]

Wait for the DMG and the official advice, then, before declaring it broken...

I actually did not declare it broken, I stated that I do not prefer this type of game mechanic because of how repetitive and predefined the results are. For those DMs who like it, have at it.

Because the way it's being published in the adventures isn't "always use passive"... So, either the DMG will concur, and give you advice to not use passive in some cases, or an option to always have a PC roll, or some other mode... But, until the rules are functionally complete, you're jumping at shadows without knowing the substance.

And don't forget that assistance is a source of potential advantage.

"Did you hear that?"
"Yeah, over that way..."

If fred and joe have passive per 10, and ralf has a passive per 14, and fred and joe are working together, their combined may be (if you as the DM grant it) advantage for a +5, giving them a combined 15. Call this the Scooby & Shaggy option; alone, clueless, but together, better than any one of the rest.

Of course, the simplest solution, KD, is to use the passive as a trigger to an active roll... Just a "You think you heard something." Then, let them react, and apply their active perception. Passives are explicitly a shortcut, not the final word.

No doubt.


For surprise rounds, our DM has everyone roll (PCs and NPCs alike). For example, if the PCs are trying to sneak up on some NPCs, the PCs roll a group stealth check and the NPCs roll individual perception. The surprise round occurs, but sometimes, nobody is surprised (i.e. it is the same as round one). Other times, some NPCs are surprised and others are not. And the final possibility is that all NPCs are surprised.

Typically in the core system, one runs into situations where the BBEG is not surprised (with a higher passive perception) and the mooks are surprised. If the mooks are not surprised, then the BBEG is not surprised 100% of the time with core (in the scenario where the BBEG has a higher passive perception). With the system that our DM uses, sometimes some of the mooks are surprised, other mooks are not surprised, and the BBEG is surprised.

This house rule feels organic and not mechanical like core. Anything can happen. Hence my preference for not using passive perception.


By the way, I'm hoping that the DMG has multiple different suggestions on how to handle skill checks both with and without passive. We'll see when it comes out.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I think it depends a lot on what this is. If this is a spare holy avenger, then sure. But if this is a box in an alley, or a beard on a dead wizard, then not so much.

I won't draw the line somewhere in the middle. Since I started playing D&D back in the day, I've been taught that the DM is in charge. It is their world, you just live in it briefly. They decide 100% of these things. You can take whatever actions you want but if the DM says there is no boxes there...well, there's no boxes there. Deal with it. Don't argue, just get on with the game.

Honestly, it never even occurred to me that facts in the game world would suddenly change because a player asked about it until this thread. It is completely foreign to me. That's the DM's job. I understand that there are some story telling games where this kind of power is given to the players, but my attempts to play them have always left me feeling a huge sense of...WRONG. Like I'm breaking the rules. I really WANT the DM to come up with these things so I don't have to.

I'm the player who wouldn't even come up with the boxes idea. I'd use the DMs description and say "Hmm, what resources do we have? A wall, a window, I'm carrying some rope and I have a grappling hook. Well, this seems fairly straightforward." Boxes wouldn't enter into it since they were never described by the DM.

I get my immersive quota of boredom from real life (domestic chores and marking exams). I wouldn't want to play with a GM who deliberately set out to have the players be bored.

I think boredom is way too strong a word. If someone said "alright, we sit in the bar waiting for a guy to show up." I'd likely spent a minute describing how they were sitting there, people came and went. They finished a couple of drinks. Someone in the corner started yelling at their wife and made a scene before storming out. A dart tournament happened and an elf won by 3 points in the final throw. They saw some people come and go on the street. They ate lunch and dinner. A couple of men came up to you and asked for some coins for drinks. What did you tell them? No? Alright. They left very disappointed. It became dark. A whole new crowd entered the bar during the evening and the place became loud and boisterous and then, nearly 8 hours after they started waiting, the man they were waiting for walks in.

The whole thing likely takes a minute to say. And for the last 30 seconds of it the players are likely thinking "Yeah, yeah, yeah...I don't care about that...does the guy we are waiting for show up or what?" Which is perfect. I've managed to add a little bit of atmosphere to the game while simultaneously adding just a little bit of impatience to the players, which is likely what their characters are feeling about now.

I've found that the roleplaying that comes out of this is much better than if I just say "You wait 8 hours and the guy walks in."

And when it comes to breaking into a second-story window, I don't see that a DC 15 climb check is inherently more exciting than climbing up a pile of boxes, lumber and hay bales.

It's slightly more exciting because it has a chance of failure and someone falling and taking damage. The other way just requires someone saying "I get boxes and stack them." No real chance of failure. But you're right, it's only minorly more exciting.

In that case it was win/win - we saved our GM the problem of showing us the door! So you should be thanking us on behalf our our GM!

It's definitely a case of a difference between player expectations and GM expectations, I'll give you that.

Well, I can tell you how it was for me and the guys I was playing with. It was already pretty clear that the GM sucked and was a grade-A railroader. The adventure was tedious and predictable. We tried capturing and interrogating the kobold as a way of breaking out of the railroad and becoming more proactive in the situation (eg taking the fight to the kobolds rather than waiting to find out whatever was meant to happen next on the GM's pre-authored timeline). And the GM roadblocked us.

Yeah, it could be that I have no issue at all with railroading. I don't consider it a bad thing and never understood the bile and venom thrown around at the mere hint of it happening. I've posted about that many times, but I believe EVERY game has railroading. Without it, there wouldn't be a game at all. It's a matter of your tolerance level for the AMOUNT of railroading.

The principle that "I get to decide what my NPCs know, how smart they are, what they feel like sharing when you capture them, and so on. If I decide they won't tell you something, then they won't tell you something" is in my view a poor principle. What is the point of the players even turning up, if their action declarations have no chance of affecting things? In the context of AD&D, for instance, there is a CHA stat - but the GM didn't make a reaction roll. There is a morale stat - but the GM didn't make a morale check. There is the monster's INT stat - which the GM ignored.

The rules are a guideline. Not ever kobold has the same Int stat. It's possible this one was dumber than the rest. It's also possible it was more a language barrier. Though, I don't know the details. The DM doesn't have to roll morale if he doesn't want to or doesn't feel it is appropriate for his game or the current situation. The DM gets to decide these things in order to make the game more fun. Often the DM knows way more details about what is going on than the players do and sometimes they understand that for the health of the game certain options need to be "restricted" in order to make the story turn out better in the long term. If that means that one kobold happens to not know the answer you're looking for in order for the adventure to proceed a certain way that is more fun, I say trust the DM to make that happen.

But I'm extremely open as a player. I don't care exactly what DMing style is being used as long as the end result is a fun game. I certainly wouldn't get angry over something I can't control(in this case, whether or not the kobold had an extremely low IQ for one of its kind and whether it knew what we wanted to know).

I've played games where the DM played in reactionary mode, only reacting to what the players

As for why the players show up...presumably because they enjoy playing the game, they want to see what happens next in the story, they want to have fun acting and roleplaying their character and their decisions, they enjoy solving puzzles and trying to figure out the answers to the problems the DM throws at them, or they want to use their cool abilities in combat and get a power trip over being better than they are in real life. Plus they still get to make decisions at various points in the game. Just not 100% of all decisions are open to them 100% of the time.

I don't think I've ever met a player who would put up with this in the context of combat resolution - having the GM fiat the effects (or non-effects) of declared attacks without regard to the rules for attack bonus, AC, hit points etc. We weren't interested in putting up with it in the non-combat context either.

Depends what you consider the GM having fiat over the effects of combat resolution. I played a game earlier today where the DM flat out said "The monster has 2 hitpoints left, but I'm going to say that kills him because I think it'll be more fun not to drag this combat out longer than it needs to." I've had DMs say "This battle is starting to drag on, and I'd like to get to the more interesting parts of this adventure. I'm going to say you win. Let's say everyone takes...1d6 more points of damage and the battle is over." I've had DMs say that based on specific circumstances that certain abilities won't work...like casting a fire spell while underwater without a clear rule for what happens. I've definitely had DMs give random +2 bonuses to people based on circumstances narrated that had no basis in the rules at all.

None of us complained any of those times. We trusted the DM. Most of the time they did it in circumstances that really DID make the game more fun or at least made sense within the context of the story as it was being told. Sometimes they abused it and we complained about it. But in the end we accepted the DMs ruling and moved onward.

And it betokens a bigger issue, too. The GM has shown that he has no interest in framing situations that his players are interested in. We clearly wanted to get some intel to run a raid on the kobolds. That's a competely viable scenario for first level PCs to engage in (look at KotB, for instance) and was a competely smooth fit with the story so far. The GM blocked it because he wanted to exercise sole control over the content of the fiction.

Framing situations the players are interested in is sometimes a really bad idea. Players rarely know what they ACTUALLY want. I've had players who REALLY wanted to be king and to rule over a country. If you give it to them, suddenly the game is boring because they now have to deal with the things kings need to actually deal with. Either that or the rest of the players get angry at you because the game is now suddenly all about the player who wanted to be king when the rest of them didn't really want to.

Part of being a DM is arbitrating what each of the players wants and the stuff you made up before the game started with the needs of the story as it has progressed so far. This almost always involves a sacrifice of some sort. It's a group based game. Sometimes that means saying "Sorry, you can't attack the kobolds because you have no idea how powerful they are. They are well organized and deadly and performing a raid on them is going to get the entire party killed. I don't want the party to die because the game will end. So, in an effort to prevent the players from leaping to their deaths, I'm going to use a rather heavy handed method to prevent them from doing it. In the end, the game will be more fun for it."

 

[KarinsDad]

Honestly, it never even occurred to me that facts in the game world would suddenly change because a player asked about it until this thread. It is completely foreign to me. That's the DM's job. I understand that there are some story telling games where this kind of power is given to the players, but my attempts to play them have always left me feeling a huge sense of...WRONG. Like I'm breaking the rules. I really WANT the DM to come up with these things so I don't have to.

This.

 

[Hussar]

I guess my quibble here is the characterisation that any game which has mechanics that allow the player to have some authorial control are automatically story games. Action points do not make D&D a Story Game. It's still a trad game that has now borrowed a smidgeon of stuff from the other side of the fence. But, again, what baffles me by all this, is the total acceptance of casters being able to completely rewrite the in-game reality whenever they feel like it.

Is it just because "it's magic"? Is that all it takes? The party has a wizard in it, faced by the second story window, the wizard drops a Rope Trick spell and poof, they climb up. There wasn't a rope there before and now, you don't even need any skill checks to climb up. All it took was a player spending a bit of character resources and the in game reality is changed. The higher the level of the caster, the greater the changes the player can effect. Sure, you can justify it as, "Well, it's magic", but, you can easily justify the boxes too. "You look around and see a bunch of crates that you hadn't noticed before". Poof, done.

Or is it that trad games have always allowed certain classes to manipulate the in-game reality, so, it just doesn't get questioned out of habit?

 

[am181d]

The DC Heroes game from the 1980s had rules for spending hero points for a convenient stacking crate.

D&D supplements from the 90s certainly talked about options to have players portray NPCs in certain scenes.

These are not new concepts in the 2000s, but have evolved organically out of more traditional RPGs.

There's a broad spectrum of RPGs, and there's nothing wrong with classifying them within that context.

I don't see the "it's not an RPG" argument being any stronger than a parent listening to a kid's favorite band and saying "Gah! That's not music!"

 

[Mark CMG]

I guess my quibble here is the characterisation that any game which has mechanics that allow the player to have some authorial control are automatically story games. Action points do not make D&D a Story Game.

That does seem to be the tipping point; like not being able to be a little bit pregnant.

Or is it that trad games have always allowed certain classes to manipulate the in-game reality, so, it just doesn't get questioned out of habit?

Two things: you can think of magic as the currency of wizards (much like a fighter could have bought and brought a rope) and the action of casting the spell is happening in-game rather than being meta-gamed by the player, trying to affect the setting from outside of the setting with a quasi-power not possessed by the character.

 

[Lerysh]

Holy balls, 16 pages later and we are still on "Players should have no authoritative control over the universe"? Really?

I said this way back on page 4 or something and I'll say it again: Saying "Yes" to players leads to happier players and better narratives. If they want to stack up boxes to reach a window instead of buying a damn grappling hook, why should you stand in the way of that? Instead of a DC 15 climb check make it a DC 15 strength check. Same edge of your seat rolling if that's what you want.

My least favorite game session I ever had the DM described a room full of barrels and boxes and an oncoming orc horde that was sure to doom us all. I started to barricade the door with barrels and boxes and the orcs rolled right of them and the rest of the party like wet tissue paper. We all died and for what, because the DM had an unwavering narrative in his head that the boxes couldn't be stacked fast enough. Not only did he not tell me that, he actively punished me for outside the box (the box being hack and slash) thinking by wasting my turn moving boxes. If instead he had run with the idea of the barricade, let us short rest like we needed, and then fight the orcs outside likely no one would have died and the session would have been much more fun.

The basic flow of the plot is establish goal, set up obstacles, allow PCs to overcome obstacles, achieve goal. Everyone wins when these things go smoothly. Obstacles and challenges should be difficult but any action a PC takes to overcome the obstacle should have some reasonable chance at success. After all, all you really want is for them to come up with a solution on their own and work it through. It might fail, and advance the plot through that failure, but it should probably succeed. Letting the PCs toil away for no result is how you get to "Look, what do I have to roll to get passed this".