D&D 5E Roleplaying in D&D 5E: It’s How You Play the Game

[Ovinomancer]

Additionally consider under formalist and non-formalist views. Suppose you accept my contention that 5e rules require

F -> G
G -> G + G -> F

You (might) say that it is formally the case that some arrows are empty, because you interpret that no rules fill them. You add that such voids include triggers for fiction to cubes, and any consequences for cubes to fiction.

I can say that it is formally the case that those arrows are not empty because as a matter of fact there are rules throughout 5e that fill them, and a super-rule that requires and empowers DM to do so in their absence. I add that you draw an invalid distinction between impaired novement and reduced HP ongoing, because both are intended to matter. DM F > Play F.

As a non-formalist I say that we may both be right according to how we interpret the constituting rules. Where the constituting rules are in doubt, the game is in doubt. You could rightly ask why on Earth we would want the game to be in doubt!? I could mutter "rulings not rules" and point to popularity.

If we have a feeling that Play F > DM F is best, then empowering DM sufficiently to do as 5e as written requires might defeat the form of play we have chosen to value. There needn't be any conflict, however, if DM uses their powers according to the best way.


So to you, narrates means say something empty of meaning? Inconsequential?

You're insistence that the GM has to narrate a fictional change requires this already, so I'm not sure what you mean here. If the orc takes damage insufficient to kill it, any fiction narrated about this event is meaningless -- it changes nothing. I am free to describe this damage as a grievous wound, which has not other effect other than color, or a narrow miss. I can, in fact, describe the loss of hitpoints in exactly the same way I could describe failure on an attack roll that has no impact on the cubes side. "Inconsequential" seems to be an apt description of your insistence that the GM must narrate a meaningless and arbitrary bit of fiction.

The consequentiality of the "narration" here is that the GM acknowledges a change on the cubes side that has no change on the fiction side. Insisting that a change on the fiction side is mandated by the basic play loop is what generates situations empty of meaning here.

 

[clearstream]

You're insistence that the GM has to narrate a fictional change requires this already, so I'm not sure what you mean here. If the orc takes damage insufficient to kill it, any fiction narrated about this event is meaningless -- it changes nothing. I am free to describe this damage as a grievous wound, which has not other effect other than color, or a narrow miss. I can, in fact, describe the loss of hitpoints in exactly the same way I could describe failure on an attack roll that has no impact on the cubes side. "Inconsequential" seems to be an apt description of your insistence that the GM must narrate a meaningless and arbitrary bit of fiction.

Here you wrongly narrate reduced HP ongoing as inconsequential. The next blow could easily kill the goblin, or the blow barely marked the golem. How will players respond to that? What difference will you narrate between barely marked and one hit from death?

5e
Player I've got to get into that compound. Lucky I came prepared! I fling a grappling hook up so that I'll be able to climb the slippery wall.
DM Sure thing, roll dice.
Player I get 19, good enough?
DM Good enough. The metal makes a clank as it hooks something up there. Feels fast.
Next F is meaningfully informed by G

5e
Player I want to attack the goblin
DM It's ready for you, sounds like you take the Attack action right?
Player That's it. Rolls. 19 hit? Okay it's 9 damage
DM It's reeling and inches from death, might even be about to flee.
Player Let's go for it then! I use my bonus action to make an off-hand attack.
Next F was meaningfully informed by G

YMMV

[Any connection between F and G is only about agreement at the table based on patterns as they interpret them. Or you are smuggling G -> G in.]

 

[Cadence]

Here you wrongly narrate reduced HP ongoing as inconsequential. The next blow could easily kill the goblin, or the blow barely marked the golem. How will players respond to that? What difference will you narrate between barely marked and one hit from death?

5e
Player I've got to get into that compound. Lucky I came prepared! I fling a grappling hook up so that I'll be able to climb the slippery wall.
DM Sure thing, roll dice.
Player I get 19, good enough?
DM Good enough. The metal makes a clank as it hooks something up there. Feels fast.
Next F is meaningfully informed by G

5e
Player I want to attack the goblin
DM It's ready for you, sounds like you take the Attack action right?
Player That's it. Rolls. 19 hit? Okay it's 9 damage
DM It's reeling and inches from death, might even be about to flee.
Player Let's go for it then! I use my bonus action to make an off-hand attack.
Next F was meaningfully informed by G

YMMV

Isn't merely knowing it lost some hit points informative? (I'm trying to think if I've ever had a DM not narrate when hits seemed to do less/no damage due to resistance/immunity).

 

[clearstream]

Isn't merely knowing it lost some hit points informative? (I'm trying to think of I've ever had a DM not narrate when hits seemed to do less/no damage due to resistance/immunity).

I think it's informative, yes. I always narrate resistance because that usually meaningfully impacts what players say next.

[And yes, short-handing to "It lost 9 HP" can communicate enough to a group who have a shared picture of what that implies.]

 

[Cadence]

I think it's informative, yes. I always narrate resistance because that usually meaningfully impacts what players say next.

[And yes, short-handing to "It lost 9 HP" can communicate enough to a group who have a shared picture of what that implies.]

How close does the shared picture even need to be? I'm guessing those reading the same novel often have very different impressions of some scenes, but the novel is still telling a story?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Here you wrongly narrate reduced HP ongoing as inconsequential. The next blow could easily kill the goblin, or the blow barely marked the golem. How will players respond to that? What difference will you narrate between barely marked and one hit from death?

This is a cubes issue, not a fiction issue. There's no fiction attached to a loss of hitpoints -- any such provided is entirely fictional. I'm not sure why you keep making the assertion that arbitrary fiction is meaningful as fiction.

5e
Player I've got to get into that compound. Lucky I came prepared! I fling a grappling hook up so that I'll be able to climb the slippery wall.
DM Sure thing, roll dice.
Player I get 19, good enough?
DM Good enough. The metal makes a clank as it hooks something up there. Feels fast.
Next F is meaningfully informed by G

Is it? The "feels fast" bit is vague and non-conclusive. This can be used to describe a success or a failure with hidden consequences. But let's skip past this and assume that the cube result of the check was a full success and so directs back to the fiction to indicate that there is a change from no attached grapple hook to an attached grapple hook. This is a cloud to cubes to cloud situation. The cloud was "I throw the hook" the cubes is the check and result and the resultant cloud is "the hook is attached."

Further, there are few reasonable ways that the cubes result feeds back into the cloud. The fiction for a successful attempt to attach a grapple hook is pretty well constrained -- some details are open, but the thrust of the situation is not. I can't really narrate this result in any appreciably different way. Sure, you can attempt to insert uncertainty back into the cloud with use of things like "feels fast" but this isn't actually related to anything in the model process.

5e
Player I want to attack the goblin
DM It's ready for you, sounds like you take the Attack action right?
Player That's it. Rolls. 19 hit? Okay it's 9 damage
DM It's reeling and inches from death, might even be about to flee.
Player Let's go for it then! I use my bonus action to make an off-hand attack.
Next F was meaningfully informed by G

YMMV

[Any connection between F and G is only about agreement at the table based on patterns as they interpret them. Or you are smuggling G -> G in.]

Here, though, there's a huge break. Your narration of the result of the check is entirely arbitrary. There's a very wide leeway in how this event can be described, and they all generate widely different fiction. As I've said, instead of describing the goblin as reeling and inches from death, it's 100% okay to describe the result as the goblin narrowly escaping a killing blow with a last moment sidestep. This is a completely different fictional description. Further, your narration above is extremely vague! You describe the result only as the goblin "reeling and inches from death." I could have used that description for the goblin from the start, because it doesn't actually have any real meaning. So, in your example, you've not only provided entirely arbitrary description of the cubes result, but one that's also vague and doesn't provide any real change to the fiction.

And I can prove that there's not change to the fiction because regardless of how I describe the loss of hitpoints, they do not constrain any future action declarations by anyone because of that fiction. The goblin being "reeling" doesn't mean it's at any penalty or restriction on it's next action. It's not actually "reeling" in that it's 100% fully functional and can, in the next moment, attack and then evade and run away easily -- something that an actually "reeling" person cannot do. If you want to retain any narrative cohesion, in fact, you HAVE to immediately negate your narration by having the goblin recover instantly prior to doing whatever the goblin does next.

No, there's no required arrow from cubes to cloud here. Insisting that you can create an arbitrary one that has no real value in the fiction doesn't mean it's so. You spoke of modal evaluation of play above, but here you're insisting that this situation is required when it very clearly is not. At best it's possible, but even then I think you're stretching things because the oft narrated fiction has no real value or impact.

Long to short, you seem to confuse the ability to say something descriptive but without heft as equivalent in all respects to something that has heft, descriptive or not. The grappling hook being attached has heft -- it's something I can leverage in play in future actions. The goblin reeling has no heft -- I cannot leverage this reeling to do anything differently from before.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In option B player still rolls.

The possible issue I see in what you described is the redundancy or load of F>F>G>FG.

DM describes foe attacking
P describes how they defend
P rolls (I use "rolls" to mean one unbroken resolution process, input through to output)
DM says what happens, reduced HP ongoing

It seems like this could be called often enough to want to remove one F from the beginning.

Well, be careful here, the GM is likely to basically say "The monster invokes feat X (on its stat block)" which is pretty thin, fictionally. I admit, this technique does motivate the GM to put some color into that, but it isn't clear to me that in all cases this will be very significant to what the player describes their PC's defense as. OTOH it can be significant. Anyway, I don't see that it would be desirable to have LESS FICTION there. I mean, if we are going to establish some level of intent and a descriptive action declaration, everyone needs something in their heads, probably supplemented by aids on the table, to generate that. This is identical with other non-combat resolutions in this system as well, like in an SC a check comes about when the GM describes some obstacle that meets the "or roll the dice" criteria (interesting failure possible, something at stake) at which point the player describes their intent and action, and then dice are tossed, etc.

What concerns me more is that the player's response and defense roll just sort of get rolled into one generic virtually fictionless piece. Like:

GM: The orc swings his battleaxe at you (notes orc is using Vicious Axe, or whatever). Its a DV 19 attack.
Player: I parry the axe blow with my sword (rolls a STR check with sword proficiency for defense). I got a 12, I'm hit.
GM: (rolls damage) You take 9 points.
Player: I'm bloodied!

That can get to be pretty minimal D&D-like level of fiction, which is what @pemerton and I were just noting. Now, if there's interesting terrain (this is all taking place on a rope bridge over a roaring chasm) you start to get into more interesting territory. Maybe the GM can up the challenge a bit, and expect the player to figure out a way to pitch the orc off the bridge, or whatever. At least people have to think a bit more OOTB to get what they want. DW does its thing pretty well, but you will note that 'tactics' is not really a thing in DW, at all.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One of the most influential author in contemporary English-language philosophy of law continues to be HLA Hart. And his account of law is as a type of normative social practice. So there is a big literature coming out of that tradition on the nature of rules, and how they relate to the social practices that they are found in and/or are elements of. Hart used games (real and imagined) to illustrate various points about the constitutive relationship of rules to practices, and that tradition continues in the literature.

There is a sense in which the stakes, in law, may be quite high - if certain legal institutions are constituted by the rules that govern them, for instance, then that has implications for how we understand rule-breaking behaviour by officials within those institutions. Eg if rule R is constitutive of the institution, and the official purports to act in accordance with not-R, then there may be a sense in which the action is not an official action at all, and hence is not attributable to the institution. (This may be a good outcome if you're trying to have the action invalidated or set aside; but a bad outcome if you're trying to sue the institution on the basis that its official's action caused you loss.)

But in the context of RPGs, I'm not sure what the stakes are. Does it matter if someone characterises and comports themself as playing D&D, although they disregard one or more rules set out in the D&D rulebooks? What turns on that?

@clearstream - Is the thought that the "functionally optional" described by Vincent Baker can be avoided if doing the thing in play is nothing more nor less than stepping through the process that involves the intended sequences of leftward and rightward arrows? So the constitutive relationship is between the process and some particular facet of play in that RPG?

Yeah, you've captured it quite well. So, it does put a vision in my head of a very formalized game system where essentially the 'Ritual of Play' is so strongly embodied in the cues that it is kind of self-enforcing, because it becomes virtually constitutive of play. In other words, what if you actually drew out something like the arrows and boxes and clouds and put them on the table? And now the process of play consisted of actually navigating that 'flow diagram' repeatedly. I mean, technically this isn't radically different from the 'how to play this game' kind of things that most RPG rule sets include. It would just be much more strongly embodied and other parts of the system would reference it directly (also it might take other forms, like picking up and discarding cards or something). I haven't really run into RPGs that have gone much in that direction, though it is quite likely I've missed a lot, lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In 5e as written, the output of roll should be

The basic pattern requires that, so cubes to cubes alone falls short of satisfying it.

This has been discussed thoroughly though, in 5e (and all not-4e basically) it is very weak at best. Unless someone went below 1 hit point there's no prescribed fiction at all, rules-wise. Nor do the mechanics offer any real input here, a 'hit' could consist of almost anything, as @Ovinomancer pointed out. Even if you side with @Lanefan and interpret every hit point as 'meat' you can't really get much out of "you take 9 points of damage from the battleaxe attack hitting you." Nor is there ANY rightward arrow back from anything described purely in the fiction about this 'wound' into the mechanics. Most players would call foul on a GM who DID impose such! Rightly too, as non-hit-point consequences of being hit are simply not there in the rules, or at least they have to be spelled out explicitly as specially stated effects. As @pemerton points out, 4e pretty much brings in a consequence for MOST attacks (essentially all 4e PC powers have an effect, there may be a very few 'vanilla' monster attacks here and there). This somewhat changed the equation, but not a whole lot.

 

[clearstream]

This has been discussed thoroughly though, in 5e (and all not-4e basically) it is very weak at best. Unless someone went below 1 hit point there's no prescribed fiction at all, rules-wise. Nor do the mechanics offer any real input here, a 'hit' could consist of almost anything, as @Ovinomancer pointed out. Even if you side with @Lanefan and interpret every hit point as 'meat' you can't really get much out of "you take 9 points of damage from the battleaxe attack hitting you." Nor is there ANY rightward arrow back from anything described purely in the fiction about this 'wound' into the mechanics. Most players would call foul on a GM who DID impose such! Rightly too, as non-hit-point consequences of being hit are simply not there in the rules, or at least they have to be spelled out explicitly as specially stated effects. As @pemerton points out, 4e pretty much brings in a consequence for MOST attacks (essentially all 4e PC powers have an effect, there may be a very few 'vanilla' monster attacks here and there). This somewhat changed the equation, but not a whole lot.

World 1. Your character is on 1 HP and the giant is barely scratched.

World 2. The giant is on 1 HP and you are barely scratched.

Proposition: These worlds are undifferentiated as to how the fiction will unfold.