As I've said, I started playing D&D with 2E, so that's what I learned and that's my perspective.
This is to me utterly unsurprising. You started with 2E. And what you are saying is
completely in line with 2E However 2E is not and has never been 1E and 1E is not and has never been oD&D. Zeb Cook's edition of D&D is not Gary Gygax' edition of D&D. Most of the rules may overlap - but the reasons, the motivation, and the worldbuilding have all changed away from the original D&D. And you are heading in to this conversation so far as I can tell treating 2E as if it is the One True Way D&D Was Created For.
It wasn't. 2E was the Worldbuilder's & Storyteller's D&D. This was a vast break away from the much more challenge focussed 1E in many ways.
From that perspective, there's nothing in 1E which suggests pawn-stance play or player authorship.
If you're saying that BECMI was all pawn-stance play and heavy retroactive continuity, then I'll take your word for it. I've never played that edition. I don't even own those books.
It's entirely possible that, if you started out in an earlier edition, then you could go into 1E with those assumptions, and that's how you'd use those rules. It would seem totally normal to you. AD&D 1E was flexible enough that either way could work within the rules.
What I'm saying is that according to those who were there, oD&D (which predates 1E - AD&D 1E was as much a ploy to deny Arneson royalties as anything) was played primarily by wargamers in pawn stance. D&D was a game written by and for tabletop wargamers but found the greatest success amongst the Science Fiction & Fantasy Fandom communities. 2E (after the removal of Gygax) was the point at which the Fandom community took over writing the rules from the wargamers. It's also the edition that suggests the DM fudges the rules and is an outlier in a number of other ways. (This isn't to say that 2E is the only outlier of course).
With the exception of 4e it's often hard to spot how a given version of D&D is an outlier as what they've done is taken the way that D&D was being played or was intended to be played at that given point in history and re-written the rulebooks round that. (4E is much less of an outlier than it appears - it's a near-ground up rewrite to the rules round one of the two late 3.5 playstyles, and the one that called back to rather than explicitly rejected Gygax' guidance).
Player decisions in a courtly Birthright game are most of the time going to be quite different than in a kill-or-be-killed medieval version of the Wild West. The resulting story, whether authored by the DM, the players, or some combination of the two, is also going to be quite different - as a direct result of the game-world setting. You can't deny this; and if the Forge does then its conclusions are based on insufficient data.
For the record, the Forge doesn't. A much better understanding of its take would be to look at the tension between the playstyle the rules indicate and the courtly setting and move the mechanical incentives to match the desired playstyle.
Within the game world, there is some truth about the colour of those clothes. That truth has always been true, even including last week. From our perspective, in the real world, we can't see that truth. All we can see is that it wasn't relevant at the time - it wasn't noteworthy enough to have been meaningful in any way.
But the infrastructure for your clothing must already be in place. Before we determine whether your pants are blue or green, we know that there was a vendor somewhere who sold them, or that your mom made them for you, or whatever. (We don't necessarily know the whatever, but we know that they must have come from somewhere.)
...
And the same is true of the lich. If the lich and all of its infrastructure (history, minions, lair, etc) did not already exist within the game world, it would not have appeared on the chart. It's just hiding in parts that haven't showed up yet.
Again, this is a very 2E take. In oD&D in at least one of the original megadungeons, the DM responded to the question of how the inhabitants of the dungeon fed themselves by inventing a McDungeon's and putting it on the 6th level, with prices in copper pieces. It's only 2E that has a mandated ecology section in the MM - and that because this is one of the ways 2E is distinct from the rest of the D&D family. If you read the 1E MM it's basically a list of statblocks with less flavour text than the 4E MM1.
Not that anyone would assume that the pants
hadn't come from somewhere, but there's no reason to specify it. But I'm going to take you back to the earliest days of D&D.
Very early D&D would be played as a troupe with more than one DM. It was as much a game of skill in beating dungeons as anything and players would take their characters from DM to DM (which is why Monty Haul DMs were so reviled - they broke power curves and undercut other DMs). This meant (a) that no one DM had control of the setting and (b) there were occasional continuity glitches as one DM's vision conflicted with another's. Which meant that what was real in the setting was what had actually appeared in play. Until the Lich is at least namedropped it doesn't exist. If another DM takes the lich over for their dungeon that's what the lich does whatever the backstory you created for it says.
And I get that you're doing it differently. You're coming at it from the direction where the lich didn't exist prior to the roll - where the DM has to invent all of that stuff on the spot, and a roll of non-lich means that there isn't necessarily a lich somewhere around there. As previously explained to me, that was apparently a thing in some of the editions I didn't play. I don't like it, and I'm not going to play that way, but I understand that your way makes perfect sense to you.
Your way is very strongly associated with 2e and to a lesser extent 3.0 and 3.5. It's not an invalid approach. But [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s is closer to the way D&D was designed. With worlds that grew rather than ones that were created in advance. And worlds that grow in ways that surprise even the DM.
I think you're splitting hairs a tad too fine here.
The ONLY reason that the boxes appear in the alley is because the player initiates their presence. There is no other reason for those boxes to be there.
We're getting into Doylist and Watsonian explanations again. From the Doylist perspective you are absolutely right. From the Watsonian one this is meaningless. Conan-Doyle is not an in universe thing in the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Nonsense. Plenty of GMs have sat down to run games creating material on the spur of the moment - whether using random generation tables, or just making stuff up because it seems like fun.
Yup. And it's cutting all this off that bugs me.
Playing like that mightn't be your preferred approach, but it is not failing to be an "equally good" GM. From my perspecive it is a prefereable GM.
Likewise.
No one upthread said that. Both @
Hussar and @
Neonchameleon have been taking it for granted that the GM always has a veto.
Explicitly saying so in my case
That's why all the at-will powers in 5e are attack or defense. They're just another way of dealing damage, which is something everyone at the table can do.
For the record this isn't true. About half the cantrips are attack powers. You can also have things like Prestidigitatation and a tiny image. And my second level Warlock managed Disguise Self and Silent Image. I might think that 5e is half-hearted as an edition but that's not a valid criticism of it.
Using a plot point or a fate point where that simply ensures that the GM has to nerf the badguy somehow is a player using an ability conferred on the player. It may be character linked, and is only a small bit different.
OK. But what game are we talking about?
A player using a plot point or fate point to declare some item exists in the fictional universe of the game is a player using an authorial ability, and is considerably different from a spell.
Indeed. Being able to move with the expectation that you understand the universe is considerably less reality warping and immersion breaking than a spell that changes the laws of physics.
And a player using a character based ability to define other characters is similar to, but more extreme than, a player using a fate point or other obviously player-only resource to do it.
And this again. Either you have a massive setting bible (Harn), you can define NPC acquaintances, or in practice you know almost no one. Majoru Oakheart (I think) mentioned that he always moves his PCs to an utterly new area - this is necessary for PCs not to feel amnesiac if the players aren't allowed to invent NPCs.
At the end of a long day, when resources have been depleted, ask why the character cannot cast the spell. The D&D spellcaster can tell you that she doesn't have any spell slots left. The Fate spellcaster... well, I'm not sure how she would explain it, because she doesn't know about the existence of Fate points. You might be able to improvise some excuse about being too tired, or some sort of magical interference, but nothing that actually corresponds to the insufficient Fate points.
That depends entirely on the Fate caster. You can easily play a Fate character who's a Mage: the Ascension escapee and who uses Fate as Quintessence and who actually does know about their own Fate points. You can also have a Fate character who took the
consequence "Magically Exhausted". Either works.
No, it's not. Not all RPGs grant the GM veto over player actions.
Fate, for example, usually puts rules authority not to the GM, but to the players. The GM has no veto, but the whole table does. (Some specific Fate games don't follow the trend, but of the 8 I've read, and 2 I've played, most do. One didn't).
Out of curiosity, which? Because I'm fairly sure
all the ones from Evil Hat grant the veto to the GM (certainly all the ones I've read). And it's Evil Hat's system.
Fate is neither fully trad nor fully storygame... it's in that space between.
You really need to stop looking at it as a binary case, and see it as a spectrum.
Fate is pretty Trad. It's no further out there than Unisystem or even Marvel Superheroes.
I've heard of this one before, but I never really bought into it. I mean, they actually did call this one out somewhere in one of the books as pretty much the definition of meta-gaming - you shouldn't assume that every monster is beatable (by you, now), or that every challenge can be overcome, just because you're playing the game. It's fallacious to assume that the world is level-appropriate to you.
Of course, that's definitely going to vary by edition. Starting at least as early as 3E, and even moreso with 4E, they really hammered on the idea that the DM should be building encounters for the party to face.
Once more you seem to be someone who takes 2E as the baseline for D&D. And it simply isn't.
If you look at old school design, each dungeon had a level. And monsters were measured by level which equates to the level of the dungeon. It was fairly clearly laid out and the dungeon level should roughly match the PC level. The PCs could tell when they were entering the wrong dungeon level (admittedly they needed to hot-foot through the wilderness because that wandering monster table was nasty). The world was approximately split up by level appropriateness in the same way MMOs often are. Building encounters
for the PCs to face happened both in dungeons (which were a skill test) and in the Dragonlance AP (a core driver of 2E) - with adventures such as Queen of the Demonweb Pits going so far as to specify which spells didn't work in advance. It's only the 2E world-sim school (as I said, an outlier in the history of D&D) that does otherwise.
And both 3.0 and 4E suggested that not all encounters should be beatable. The reason it doesn't look this way is that there was an internet outcry against the Roper in the bottom of the Forge of Fury and WotC didn't want to annoy the fans.
