If an NPC is telling the truth, what's the Insight DC to know they're telling the truth?

[iserith]

The problem with reading the rules and imagining the game play, de novo, is the same problem with reading sheet music and imagining the song in your head. Very few people can really do that.

So it’s natural that people reach for the nearest possible experience to inform their current doings.

Sure, that's reasonable. And it argues for a continual checking of oneself in my view, something I commonly dispense as advice: Ask yourself if the thing you're doing is informed by the game you're playing now or something you're bringing in from another game. Then examine it fully to determine if you need to leave it behind or keep using it in order to achieve the intended game experience. Once you arrive at that intended game experience, evaluate and see if it's for you.

You can see this to some degree in the short-form scenario designs I've posted. The earlier ones show a lot of D&D 4e influence and slowly over time that goes away.

 

[Bawylie]

Sure, that's reasonable. And it argues for a continual checking of oneself in my view, something I commonly dispense as advice: Ask yourself if the thing you're doing is informed by the game you're playing now or something you're bringing in from another game. Then examine it fully to determine if you need to leave it behind or keep using it in order to achieve the intended game experience. Once you arrive at that intended game experience, evaluate and see if it's for you.

You can see this to some degree in the short-form scenario designs I've posted. The earlier ones show a lot of D&D 4e influence and slowly over time that goes away.

Look at this guy advocating self-examination. Yeah, right! Ain’t nobody got time fo dat!

 

[Charlaquin]

The point I was making though is that the designers were intending the game to be played by people with no gaming experience. That's how the game is written to me. Since I'm not that, the advice doesn't really appeal as much.



To me, this experience would be far too structured and rely far to heavily on the DM being at the front and center of the game. Simply ignoring this bit of the game in favor of trusting that my players know what they're doing instead of having me have to judge every declaration means that we have a better experience.

5e is written from the point of view that it has to be played by 15 year olds who've never role played before. So, it gives a very structured approach - goal and method as you call it - which will work very well at nearly any table. There's nothing wrong with doing it this way. It certainly works. And, yes, it certainly would clear up misunderstandings if followed faithfully.

I don’t think it’s so much an assumption that the players will need that level of structure, but rather that D&D 5e aims to create a play experience that said structure facilitates. The structure is the approach, not the goal. That said, if the goal is not one that interests you - if you don’t enjoy the play experience that structure is designed to facilitate - then it makes perfect sense to discard that structure.

OTOH, it assumes that the group needs this level of structure and that narrative power over the game rests very squarely on the DM's shoulders. That the players have their area of control in the game and the DM has everything else. LIke I said, I have no problems with players declaring stuff to be true. In the earlier example of climbing the wall and using boxes, it would not bother me in the slightest for the player to declare that he climbed the wall because there were boxes among the bric a brac in the last room and that he stacked them up to climb over the wall. IOW, the boxes were never described prior to the player rolling a success.

Doesn't happen much, but, I have no problem with it. 5e does not grant much authorial control to the players by the rules. I prefer the players to have more authorial control in the game. I LOVE it when the players declare stuff to be true that I hadn't added in. Lots of "Yes , and" sort of improv stuff. Would not be something that would work in a group of new players as well, and would not work with the goal and method approach either since it's the success of a check that allows the player to declare things in the game.

I guess that is another central idea - for you, a check is called for when the players haven't found a way to do something without needing a check. For me, a check allows the players to author elements in the game that weren't there beforehand.

Sounds like 4e to me. And that’s not a bad thing. I still think 4e is the best-designed edition of D&D, from a mechanical standpoint.

 

[Guest 6801328]

So the advice I give to a lot of people trying out D&D 5e, though this applies to anyone in my view: Forget what you know about other games. Read the rules. Try to imagine the game experience it will create when followed and the approaches needed to support it. Play it and see if you like it. Then decide if it needs changing or abandoning altogether.

My favorite RPG, The One Ring, suffers (in the marketplace, not as a game) from not living up to the expectation of being a lot like D&D. People try to play it like D&D, and are disappointed.

New gamers, who actually read and follow the rules without trying to translate it to D&D, seem to like it more.

This relates to my beef with Modiphius games, too. They don’t seem to realize that rules set tone, and so they just keep refluffing 2d20 for every setting and genre.

 

[Tony Vargas]

One wonders what the rules would look like if they were intending the game to be played by people with a lot of gaming experience.

5e is very much suited to being played by both new/casual players, blissfully unaware that there even /are/ other TTRPGs, and long-time/returning D&Ders who first sat down with dice & minis in the 20th century.
I'd go so far as to say, ideally, at the same table, with an old-timer behind the screen.

Of course, that's hand-in-glove with making the game both acceptable to the established hard-core fanbase /and/ accessible to the mainstream.

So maybe they were intending one and got the other as a side benefit, or maybe they were trying for both under the big-tent philosophy of inclusion?


Whatever it was, it worked.

 

[5ekyu]

My favorite RPG, The One Ring, suffers (in the marketplace, not as a game) from not living up to the expectation of being a lot like D&D. People try to play it like D&D, and are disappointed.

New gamers, who actually read and follow the rules without trying to translate it to D&D, seem to like it more.

This relates to my beef with Modiphius games, too. They don’t seem to realize that rules set tone, and so they just keep refluffing 2d20 for every setting and genre.

Re the link between rules and tone and 2d20 in particular - cannot agree more. Tone and setting need rules that reinforce those and highlight them to reach their best - or sometimes even good enough.

Spent way too many years running " generic" systems you tailor yo fit setting - which boils down to making the setting fit within the system more than anything else. We had fun, but more in spite of than because of the massive systems and processes.

Still, they taught us things we usecdvrn today in other systems and other games.

 

[Hussar]

I don’t think it’s so much an assumption that the players will need that level of structure, but rather that D&D 5e aims to create a play experience that said structure facilitates. The structure is the approach, not the goal. That said, if the goal is not one that interests you - if you don’t enjoy the play experience that structure is designed to facilitate - then it makes perfect sense to discard that structure.


Sounds like 4e to me. And that’s not a bad thing. I still think 4e is the best-designed edition of D&D, from a mechanical standpoint.

Yeah, I can see that. 4e borrows heavily from more ... ummm... hippy dippy, pass the story stick style gaming that I really enjoy.

So, yes, I approach most RPG's the same way. Handing over more and more load onto the players is something that I strongly approve of. Certainly not to everyone's tastes though.

As far as what 5e would have looked like had it been written for experienced gamers, I would think it would be a lot closer to 4e, to be honest. Where you don't need to spell out all the hand holding that 5e does with "DM Empowerment" stuff. Experienced gamers, especially ones who have drifted away from D&D and tried other games, generally don't seem to have the issues that gamers who strongly seem to focus on D&D as their game of choice and see the rules, as you do [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION], as promoting a specific way of playing, rather than simply an a la carte selection of options to pick and choose from and then kit bash from other systems to create a game that is idiosyncratic to that specific table.

The funniest thing about 5e is how similar people's play styles actually have become. Rather than the completely different experiences that people had with earlier editions, the notion of shared experience really has come to the forefront. Heck, the whole Streaming Play stuff is all about that shared experience. You wouldn't get thousands of people watching someone's live play game if that table's play style was too idiosyncratic to that table. There needs to be this shared approach for this to be popular.

OTOH, I've never seen RPG books as a "How to Play" guide. I see them as a collection of ideas that I'm then going to pick and choose from to create a game for my table. Sometimes that game will be very, very close to what's in the books, and sometimes it'll be completely different. Depends on the campaign to be honest.

 

[Tony Vargas]

As far as what 5e would have looked like had it been written for experienced gamers, I would think it would be a lot closer to 4e, to be honest. Where you don't need to spell out all the hand holding that 5e does with "DM Empowerment" stuff. Experienced gamers, especially ones who have drifted away from D&D and tried other games, generally don't seem to have the issues that gamers who strongly seem to focus on D&D as their game of choice

Long-time monoglot D&Ders are still very much 'experienced gamers,' and may well be a plurality of such, especially if you start dividing up the remainder by system of choice. /Ecclectic/ experienced gamers probably are something of a minority.

5e couldn't have been much like 4e without ticking off the long-time D&Ders, so I can't agree. If 5e had prioritized appealing to experienced gamers over mainstream appeal, it'd've ended up a lot more like Pathfinder, a system-master's playground.

The funniest thing about 5e is how similar people's play styles actually have become. Rather than the completely different experiences that people had with earlier editions, the notion of shared experience really has come to the forefront. Heck, the whole Streaming Play stuff is all about that shared experience. You wouldn't get thousands of people watching someone's live play game if that table's play style was too idiosyncratic to that table. There needs to be this shared approach for this to be popular.

I'm not so sure other WotC eds delivered wildly divergent experiences. Sure, the D&D of the fad years - remember, this was in veritable Dark Ages before the Internet - was played very differently from region to region, right down to being wildly different from one DM to the next.

I get the impression it has gotten less variable as time went on, first as the hobby contracted after the fad flopped, then as our on-line world grew figuratively 'smaller.' Now, yeah, perhaps ironically, as the hobby grows with mainstream adoption, it may become that much more homogeneous.

 

[iserith]

As far as what 5e would have looked like had it been written for experienced gamers, I would think it would be a lot closer to 4e, to be honest. Where you don't need to spell out all the hand holding that 5e does with "DM Empowerment" stuff. Experienced gamers, especially ones who have drifted away from D&D and tried other games, generally don't seem to have the issues that gamers who strongly seem to focus on D&D as their game of choice and see the rules, as you do [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION], as promoting a specific way of playing, rather than simply an a la carte selection of options to pick and choose from and then kit bash from other systems to create a game that is idiosyncratic to that specific table.

Just for the sake of clarity on my viewpoint, I'll note as an aside that while I do hold to the rules on "How to Play" which I consider fundamental to the game experience, I'm very much in favor of turning some rules on and some rules off - tuning the dials, as it were - to point toward a campaign concept or theme. For a classic dungeon crawl, I might go with the variant encumbrance rules, for example. For my Planescape game, I added Alignment to Ideal as another option to earn Inspiration since that plays into that campaign's theme. In my Eberron game, since it's about "pulp serial heroes," I took PC death off the table; you can lose, but you can't die (unless you choose to). I think D&D 5e is actually quite good in this regard. But when it comes to "How to Play" - what the DM does and what the players do - that always remains constant.

 

[pemerton]

Rolling dice is not the primary resolution mechanic of the game, in my view. The primary resolution mechanic is using a human brain to imagine a fictional scenario and determine the likely outcome of the action within that scenario. If, and only if the outcome can not be determined by this method alone, then rolling dice is a tool to help make that determination.

I'm glad you spelled this out, because it was the first thing I thought when I read [MENTION=6801228]Chaosmancer[/MENTION]'s remark about the game's resolution method - ie that you would not agree.

we aren't talking about goal and approach. We are talking about whether or not giving players information on the consequences of their actions leads to better and more dramatic roleplaying. That has nothing to do with how the players approach the problem and all about how much we tell them.

As a semi-participant in this particualr discusion with [MENTION=6779196]Charlaquin[/MENTION], I will say that what you describe here doesn't ring true to me at all, for my game.

I'm not talking about tellling players coonsequences which would obtain even if the players weren't told. I'm talking about telling the players those consdequences that obtain, or - alternatively - having those consequences be implict in the framing of the situation and the plyaer's knowledge of why the situation matters.

I don't think that keeping potential consequences secret from the players makes for good RPGing.

You are standing in on the second floor of a mansion, guards are charging up the stairs and you need to escape. You see a window and a chandelier, across from which is a ledge leading somewhere else, in addition to the stairs leading down. What do you do?

<snip>

the player can't spend 10 minutes checking the stability of the chandelier. It is a viable option, but a failed check might lead to it breaking, and the player doesn't know it could break.

The devil is always in the details, of course - but at the level of generality that you have presented this example, the risk of the chandelier breaking would seem to be very much implict in the framing of the situation.

your decision to try and disable a magic circle humming with energy is not invalidated if when you fail I decide to teleport the entire party to the Far North instead of having it all unleash in a massive fireball like you expected.

I don't agree with this at all. If it wasn't implicit in the situation that such a thing might happen, I would regard this as very bad GMing. I once had a thing a bit like this happen in a game - the GM teleported the party 100 years into the future. The effect was to largely invaldiate all our play to date, which was enmeshed in a particular time and place. (I think the GM did it because he felt he had lost control of the campaign, and wanted to reestablish that control.)

I quite the game a session or two after that, and I heard that it ended not long after.

If details are important, add them. Add in an extra level of interaction. But if it makes sense for the story for there to be a somewhat difficult to climb run-of-the-mill wall I may include it. Unless it's important I get past it with as little muss and fuss as possible.

To me, this would seem a good reason not to call for a check at all, because nothing is at stake.. Just narrate the climbing of the unremarable wall and keep moving until something more significant comes up.

So, just to be clear, y’all would allow a player to roll (and potentially fail) to perform a task that you didn’t initially plan to require a roll to succeed on, simply because they announced that they were making a check? That’s actually how you would all rule in that situation?

For my part, it would depend. If the DC is zero/automatic (as per [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s comments upthread), no. But if what's going on is a mismatch between GM and player expectations as to whether something is at stake, it might be time for a re-calibration in our understanding of the situation.

Either way, I couldn't imagine it playing out like [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION]'s example.