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

[clearstream]

What does meaningful mean? Let me give you some examples of play, and you tell me what meaningful resolution your 5e* demands. Note I'm asking what 5e* demands, not what you, as GM, arbitrarily insert. Because arbitrary insertion, while it can create plenty, isn't doing the work you're claiming that 5e* requires.

My PC is trying to climb a cliff. The outcome has been deemed uncertain and the DC is set at 15 (I may or may not know this). I have a +10 total bonus (stat+proficiency+other) to my check. I roll a 2 on the d20, and get a total of 12 on my check. What result is required and what meaningful narration results.

My PC is trying to climb a cliff. The outcome has been deemed uncertain and the DC is set at 15 (I may or may not know this). I have a +2 total bonus (stat+proficiency+other) to my check. I roll a 2 on the d20, and get a total of 4 on my check. What result is required and what meaningful narration results?

My PC is trying to climb a cliff. The outcome has been deemed uncertain and the DC is set at 15 (I may or may not know this). I have a +2 total bonus (stat+proficiency+other) to my check. I roll a 12 on the d20, and get a total of 14 on my check. What result is required and what meaningful narration results?

Each of these represents a failure to play 5e*.

Start with meaningful consequences in mind. If you haven't any, don't roll.

 

[HammerMan]

Having played games where taking damage makes you weaker (e.g. Legend of the Five Rings 2E IIRC), I'm perfectly fine with that. The alternative is basically a death spiral where the first combatant to take damage is at a severe disadvantage for the rest of the fight. It's a valid design, but it's not one that really fits the idea of heroic fantasy.

OWoD was like this. in Vampire and Mage especially the first hit or two could decide a fight most times. (werewolf had a gift to ignore the penalties, but that made it worse when you had a bunch of vamps gang up on a WW just to have it multi attack to put some wounds into each)

having said that I do wish there were some form of it at least in optional rules for 5e. My biggest gripe is when a fighter takes 50-60 damage and acts like it is nothing...

I even have a DM/Player who often says "I have 1hp that matters the rest is fun buffer zone"

 

[pemerton]

Are you taking "narrate" in the basic pattern to mean "say something meaningless"? You earlier argued that saying something meaningless was not narration in an RPG sense.

No. I am using narrate to mean introduce, by way of stating it, some fiction.

The narration that Baker characterises as functionally optional is not meaningless. Eg “Amek tears out after him,
shouting for his men" (IAWA, p 15) is not meaningless. But it doesn't generate rightward arrows. Even if Amek's player says nothing at all, "the game just chugs along" because the players can compare the dice rolls, pass the advantage die as appropriate, roll the next round, and (once the third round is resolved, or an absolute victory is achieved earlier) apply the appropriate consequences.

The same can be true of D&D's hit-point based combat resolution. This is why conditions pay such a vital role in 4e D&D, because they generate leftward arrows with concrete changes to the fiction (a character is prone, or is burning, or is poisoned, or is pushed or teleported or frozen in terror). The rightward arrows remain fewer than in, say, Dungeon World or Burning Wheel (as @AbdulAlhzared posted about upthread) but the connection to the fiction is more intricate than in purely hp-oriented D&D combat.

In my example of narrating minimal damage, a player felt something - an anxiety about the outcome that motivated a retreat. The results were relevant: something changed in the fiction. What to narrate is down to each DM at the table.

But the player could decide to retreat based purely on the hp numbers.

I played the little wargame with my daughter again on Wednesday afternoon. I used an ability to retreat one of my forces, because I could see that the formation it was part of was going to lose to my daughter's formation. But there was no fiction involved.

If you refuse to produce meaningful narration, then it cannot be surprising when we find that narration to be "functionally optional".

I don't see what this has to do with Baker's analysis. It seems to talk about something quite different. Baker is not talking about refusing to narrate vs narrating. He's contrasting being compelled to narrate with merely being permitted or being enjoined to narrate. The latter is what he describes as a system that "lacks teeth" and hence makes the arrows between cues and fiction that it urges functionally optional.

The distinction that Baker draws is not a novel one in general - the difference, in process design, between one which can't be gone through without doing all the desirable things associated with the process, and one that depends on urging and goodwill for all those things to be done, I think is fairly well known. Baker's insight consists in seeing how this distinction manifests itself in RPG design and hence RPG play.

Baker is concerned to do something that I say is in the end unachievable.

Well, he clearly thinks he's achieved it, with DitV. I think he's also achieved it with Apocalypse World. I can see the difference he refers to when I compare how 4e plays with how MHRP/Cortex+ plays (a rather comparable degree of boxes to boxes with sometimes merely optional leftward arrows) to how Burning Wheel or Classic Traveller players (lots of rightward arrows at nearly every point of resolution, with Duel of Wits being a bit of an exception in the case of BW).

It's not that hard to design a resolution system that makes fictional position a necessary input. It can be harder to have the system also be a satisfying one (Classic Traveller has a few rough edges, compared to AW), but the basic design is not unachievable.

Here's two rule compared, that illustrate the difference:

From 4e D&D, the 16th level Sorcerer utility Dominant Winds: As a move action, enable yourself or one ally in a close burst 5 to fly a number of squares equal to your Dexterity modifier as a free action.

From Classic Traveller: When you activate your ships jump drive, make a dice throw to avoid mis-jump, applying <specified modifiers> and requiring <specified target number> for success.​

Neither rule is especially fancy; both pertain to movement. The Classic Traveller one is, at its core, structurally the same as an AW or DW player-side move - an action performed by a character in the fiction requires a check. And the consequences of the check feed back into the fiction: if it succeeds, the ship enters jump space and travels to its intended destination; if it fails, then the ship ends up jumping to some random destination determined by the referee (canonically via a random dice roll, though I can report from experience that it doesn't hurt the game to do it a bit differently - I rolled the specified number of dice to determine the mis-jump distance, but placed a world at that point, drawn from my handy file of pre-generated worlds, rather than having the PCs just die in empty space unable to refuel their vessel).

The 4e D&D rule is specified almost entirely in "cube" terms: the trigger and the flight time are both specified in terms of an action economy, the targetting is specified by reference to squares on a map (ie cues), the distance flown is specified by reference to a cue (ie a Dexterity bonus), and the movement type itself (flight) involves a whole lot of cue-ish things.

In order to get functionally non-optional leftward out of the 4e move, the GM has to take deliberate steps in establishing the situation, such as terrain that requires or ate least invites flying to circumvent it; and to get rightward arrows you need stuff like winds that blow flying creatures around, or low ceilings that flying creatures might bang their heads on, and the like. (Again, @AbdulAlhazred has posted about this upthread.)

To somewhat echo @Ovinomancer, none of this is to assert that Classic Traveller is a better RPG than 4e D&D. In fact I think it is easier to create compelling fiction in 4e D&D than it is in Classic Traveller! But there is no doubt that to do that in 4e requires those additional techniques of very deliberate situation design - for instance, the first ever combat I ran in 4e was adapted from the B/X module Night's Dark Terror and involved the PCs on a boat on the river, with a chain across the river to stop their boat, enemies swimming to them and coming to them on a raft, a sandbar to move to from the boats, an enemy slinger on one bank, etc. Beside the colourful nature of it, all that stuff helped to ensure that both leftward and rightward arrows would be generated, and thus that the fiction would seem "real" in Baker's sense - again, that is not real in the sense of "realistic" but real in the sense of a feeling of "heft" and independence of will and artifice.

It's obvious, given the amount of criticism that was directed towards 4e over the 4 or so years of its active lifespan, that many RPGers did not succeed in generating those arrows in their 4e play: for them it was just a miniature skirmish game with boxes to boxes. Whereas while I think it is quite easy for Classic Traveller to generate boring fiction - for instance, you don't have to read very hard between the lines to see that this was a concern informing a lot of the Traveller commentary in early 80s White Dwarf - I don't think many players of it would fail to generate arrows to the left or the right. At least its resolution systems make that easy by default.

I advocate a radical interpretation of 5e. Let's call the game played my way 5e*. To be playing 5e* a DM must ensure that "narrate" means "say something meaningful". When it comes to ability checks they must prefer the plain rule about meaningful consequences. When it comes to combat, they must narrate results in ways that are meaningful. They're expected to use their power as an author of fiction to achieve that ("the orc winds its horn!")

I think I'm missing how this is radical. You're saying that the GM should narrate fiction. Didn't the 2nd ed AD&D books say something similar?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Each of these represents a failure to play 5e*.

Start with meaningful consequences in mind. If you haven't any, don't roll.

Ok. Then there's a cliff. I wish to climb it. What meaningful consequences are there here?

I'm asking for a clear example of your 5e* play. If this doesn't make sense, the please provide what does in regards to an attempt to climb a cliff.

 

[clearstream]

No. I am using narrate to mean introduce, by way of stating it, some fiction.

Thus you have chosen not to play 5e*. [Or perhaps I mistake your meaning. Can you expand on what you mean by stating some fiction?]

I think I'm missing how this is radical. You're saying that the GM should narrate fiction. Didn't the 2nd ed AD&D books say something similar?

Citation?

Radical. Relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something. Nothing turns on this characterisation: I freely abandon it!

 

[clearstream]

Ok. Then there's a cliff. I wish to climb it. What meaningful consequences are there here?

I'm asking for a clear example of your 5e* play. If this doesn't make sense, the please provide what does in regards to an attempt to climb a cliff.

Why do you want to climb the cliff? What's the establishing fiction here?

 

[pemerton]

That's only a conflict if you're hung up on the idea that capability loss needs to be tied into taking physical wounds. That isn't a given in heroic fantasy. It's just as plausible for the fiction to be that the heroes take a beating, but push through the pain to be their best anyway. Not realistic perhaps, but again: fantasy.

In 4e D&D, the heroes take a beating, but push through the pain. A fiction to this effect is created - we see them be beaten up (eg the get pushed around, knocked down, poisoned, etc) - and then we see them recover and push through (they stand up, they shrug off the poison, they retake the positions they were pushed out of, etc).

But in a system the relies overwhelmingly on hp loss, I don't see the beating. Of course it can be asserted, or colourfully narrated. But where does it appear in the actual play of the game?

I dislike most iterations of death spirals myself, but even there, a lot of those don't create fictional bits as a matter of necessity but are also keeping the spiral on the mechanics side. Anything that just generates a mechanical penalty without a required change to fiction does this.

I mostly play death spiral systems (RM, Prince Valiant, Burning Wheel, MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic, Classic Traveller across combats though not within them).

Some involve fiction (eg RM, BW). Some are boxes-to-boxes (eg MHRP/Cortex+ a fair bit of the time). Classic Traveller is interesting because it's a bit like Baker's example of the oppressive heat - while injury within a given conflict is pure boxes-to-boxes, carrying penalties created in one scene into the next creates a sense of a "reality" that is hindering the character. Conversely, in Prince Valiant there is little carrying of penalties from conflict to conflict and so the actual attrition can sometimes feel box-to-box-y, though the corresponding drop in character ability helps give a general sense of a fiction in which the losing character is beset (the resolution is opposed pools with the margin of failure reducing the loser's pool for the next round of rolls). And Prince Valiant has other aspects in its mechanics (like very easy "p 42"-type stuff, crisp rules for situational modifiers and the like) that generate both leftward and rightward arrows.

There's no capability loss at all, though, which is the fundamental point. You've skipped ahead to where there's some capability loss and tied it to physical wounds. 5e combat does not create any capability loss though it's hp attrition model. This is why it doesn't create any changes in the fiction -- there's no change in the fiction, just in a non-fictionally represented tally.

I agree with this. It's also interesting to think about approaches where there is no capability loss, but the fiction is nevertheless changed.

One possibility might be this: being hit causes depletion of strength or will or whatever, but a 13th-Age escalation die steps up, generating at least an approximate counterbalance. But then, once the moment of crisis (encounter) is over, the escalation die goes away but the penalty is still there. I'm just making this up, but I think something along these lines could be a way of getting the "oppressive heat" effect without each combat involving a death spiral (though without taking steps - eg resting or healing - there might be an "adventure"-level death spiral).

 

[Ovinomancer]

You might harbour a notion that if you belittle another's arguments they will recognise your superior intellect and feel forced to abandon their position. Your rhetoric in this direction is not worthy of your insights, which I value nevertheless.


When it comes to how a DM should run the game, which presides are the plain rules in the section "Running the Game" in the core book "Dungeon Masters Guide".

Nothing in the Players Handbook is in conflict. Rather it lacks the detail that is filled in for DM in their guide.


I am talking about what the system says. I'm not pointing out that the game doesn't force you to play a certain way. I'm pointing out that the game as written tells you to play a certain way and that common practice is to play it in a traditional way (or I suspect, most often a composite.)


I think the only way to settle your (unhelpfully and irrelevantly insulting) disagreements here would be if we can agree on a definition of fiction, so that you will be able to show that it is unchanged.

I will start. Fiction is a collection of facts held among participants. The nature of those facts is that they are not defined by the game as game, although it is expected that they are informed by it and relate to it in ways that all participants will agree to.


Provide the quotations and I will take a look. The published adventures occasionally do things that contradict the rules. In forum discussion that I have experienced up to this point they have been considered tertiary (by other posters, that view didn't originate with me.) But I like your argument about their forming live examples.

I have lots of things I could say here, but, ultimately, your claims and arguments run smack into the following wall:

PHB pg 174, under Ability Check, last paragraph:

To make an ability check, roll a d20 and add the relevant abilityy modifier. As with other d20 rolls, apply bonuses and penalties, and compare the total to the DC. If the total equals or exceeds the DC the ability check is a success -- the creature overcomes the challenge at hand. Otherwise, it's a failure, which means the character or monster makes no progress toward the objective or makes progress combined with a setback determined by the GM.

Emphasis mine. This directly contradicts your interpretation of the "meaningful consequence" passage in the DMG by directly and unequivocally stating that a fair outcome to a failed check is just no progress towards the objective. Your claim that "meaningful consequence" means that some change to the fiction is required appears to be not actually required. Instead, we need to consider that "meaningful consequence" is considered to include no progress towards the objective.

 

[clearstream]

I have lots of things I could say here, but, ultimately, your claims and arguments run smack into the following wall:

PHB pg 174, under Ability Check, last paragraph:

Emphasis mine. This directly contradicts your interpretation of the "meaningful consequence" passage in the DMG by directly and unequivocally stating that a fair outcome to a failed check is just no progress towards the objective. Your claim that "meaningful consequence" means that some change to the fiction is required appears to be not actually required. Instead, we need to consider that "meaningful consequence" is considered to include no progress towards the objective.

@pemerton answered this. Failure to progress in some cases is a consequence that matters. Where that is not the case, DM will have called for the roll because they had a consequence in mind.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Why do you want to climb the cliff? What's the establishing fiction here?

I'm confused. What does this have to do with anything in 5e? 5e doesn't require any such extra consideration to invoke or resolve a challenge. But, sure, I can provide. Let me give you 3:

1) The lands are dark, the end is nigh, and the last, desperate hope for existence is to stop the ritual occurring atop the Cliffs of Trenners. I must ascend!

2) There's a rumor of a great treasure resting atop the Cliffs of Trenners. My sense of adventure and need for money has driven me to ascend and determine the truth of these rumors.

3) I haven't seen my mother for some time, and she lives in a small hut atop the Cliffs of Trenners. I could take the trail that winds around to the east, but I want to surprise her by arriving from an unexpected direction, so I must ascend the cliffs.

To be 100% clear, the status and nature of the cliffs is exactly the same in each of these cases.