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

[Lanefan]

Do you require checks for a PC to walk?

No, under normal circumstances on reasonable terrain; and why do you immediately leap to the ridiculous extreme?

But I do require a check for things like climbing walls, largely because falling from said walls hurts even if it only happens 1 time in 20 (or less).

 

[clearstream]

The answers didn't really show your claimed approach, though, because they didn't follow the basic loop of play and you continued to insist even in your last response.

Seeing as I understood we had reached a validly called "roll" in each case, I proceeded from that point to narrate only a possible result. I don't recall any sign that it was the whole play loop that was being interrogated. That could have been made clearer, but as it is from my perspective you are saying I didn't adequately answer a question that I didn't answer at all.

That loop is the GM describes the situation or scene, the player declares actions, the GM evaluates and resolves those actions (perhaps calling on mechanic or just deciding what happens) and then the GM narrates the outcomes. The scene described is the cliff -- it's the immediate obstacle. The action is climbing the cliff. The result for case 1 was for something outside this scene -- like decided the outcome of an adventure on a single check on the way to the expected end. The result for case 2 was addition of new fiction not related to the declared goal or the challenge -- still, you were trying to be cool and show some creativity, but it's not helpful to do this when showing adjudication process -- it clouds the result. So, that aside, you reverted to status quo -- no progress -- with no other real consequence other than discovery that the rival was engaged. You actually offered a different path to success here. I'm not sure what the actual meaningful consequence was in this case. And then, in case three, it's just straight up no progress with offer to retry. I don't see the principled approach you're claiming here -- you insisted that something outside the loop must be present to give the loop meaningful consequence, so I provided that curious to see the results. And the results either ignored that (case 3), muddled it (case 2), or turned the scene into the resolution for a major event straight out (case 1).

I see what you mean. I wish you had made it clear or I had guessed you wanted the whole player loop. As it was, yes. 100%. I said nothing about the parts of the loop I thought were settled. And because I thought them settled, meaningful consequences were perforce already in play. Stipulated largely by you.

To offer my approach as a counterweight, I don't really care why a character is doing a given task at the level you asked for. I want to know what the PC is doing for their action and what the intent of that action is only. Climbing a cliff? Need to know the approach -- free climbing is fine -- and need to know the intent -- usually to get to the top, but there might be an added "get to the top without being seen." I need to know this bit not so that I can provide meaningful consequences by attacking a goal, but because I want to make sure that I'm 100% clear on what the player wants to do so I don't step on it. Climbing has lots of available setbacks and consequences that I can leverage that aren't just 'no progress,' and I never need to reach to a larger goal to get to them. Since the PC in the examples just wants to get to the top, I can treat a failure in any number of ways -- I have threatened loss of gear (a slip causes a sword to begin sliding out of a scabbard, you can let it go and regain your position and complete the climb, or try to grab it, but that's going to be another check depending on how you want to try it at the same DC, failure means you lose your hold entirely and follow the sword down, success means you grab the sword before it slips out and continue to climb okay), I've paid off in hp damage (you slip and slide and tumble down about 20 feet before you fetch up against an outcrop and arrest your fall; take (2d10) damage from getting banged around), I've paid off in attacking the immediate intent (you wanted to climb stealthly, but at the top of the climb, a rock pulls free and starts a clatter down the cliff, dislodging some others for a good bit of racket. You hear the guards say "what was that" and steps coming your way. You're hanging at the edge of the cliff, pulling yourself up will be like standing from prone, what do you do?). Lots and lots of ways. All have impact and drive further play.

This is all good, but again I have nothing to defend. I asked for you to establish the situations and understood all establishing facts to be settled satisfactorily. The question as I understood it was - given we have reached "roll", how are we going to narrate each result? I focused on what you presented, with the assumption that the threadbare facts in each case were not at issue.

Take 1. If there is a ritual at the top of a cliff consequences might well come down to time. You'd repeatedly asked about no progress results so I guessed that it was that result you wished to be narrated. No progress. One or a string of awful rolls stymy the player completely. If that happened, the ritual must complete or our putative meaningful consequences are not meaningful at all. If the ritual completes and you turn out the lights, you've hung too much on a climb check. Therefore the worst consequence must be open-ended in some way. Having run OOTA I know that even something as apocalyptic as summoning a demon lord can play out to an interesting campaign: it seemed the obvious candidate and I assumed we were both aware of that broader context.

If you want to talk about my narrations in these cases further we can do that, but only if we are discussing narration of result of a validly called "roll": the question I was answering. Or we can revisit them with better questions, which would for e.g. require my exploring how "roll" was rightly reached.

[EDIT To adjust and assume good faith as I can see that I assumed bad faith up thread.]

 

[clearstream]

@Ovinomancer perhaps we need to proceed like this: tell me what the doubt is. Supply the question plainly. I'm happy to work in good faith to interrogate my own arguments. As noted above, if I mistake your question, then it can't be surprising if we end up in dispute about what was learned.

Had you said something like - let's see each step on the way to reaching "roll" so we see how roll was called based on meaningful consequences. Then I would count valid the subsequent interrogation. As it is, that's not what I answered so any subsequent interrogation is invalidated.

And in hindsight, I feel like that really was your actual question, but that was absolutely opaque to me. I understood that in each case "roll" had been rightly called, and we solely wanted to look at how the results were going to be narrated.

If I am right about your real question, then I can see where your subsequent comments are coming from. Hopefully you can see that I answered a very different question... and when the question changed ( from my perspective) that felt like moving goalposts.

 

[clearstream]

Meaningful in what sense? If the meaning is all in the mechanics, (IE falling will cause damage, which may have some further impact on the character's ability to act) that isn't meaningful narrative, IMHO. Frankly I would say that it isn't meaningful in a way that really matters to me unless there's some DRAMATIC impact, but dramatic impact does not require us to posit any causal linkage within the fiction, that is WHAT the drama is isn't implied by either the mechanics OR the fiction, except that the game requires in a failure case it go against the intent of the PC.

You answered your own question The bolded words are your answer. Meaningful in the sense that matters to your group.

 

[Krachek]

I think this thread prove that DnD is game with high intellectual and philosophical concept.

Just try to resolve the “secret door case” we are on the same level of Greek philosopher who were asking who come first the object or the idea of the object.

Debating of the existence of the door until players find it, we are just in quantum physics science, when they realize that the experimenter influence the results at quantum level.

Debating on shared fiction, we just take the path of collective unconsciousness of Carl Jung.

we can be proud of our community.

 

[Ovinomancer]

No, under normal circumstances on reasonable terrain; and why do you immediately leap to the ridiculous extreme?

But I do require a check for things like climbing walls, largely because falling from said walls hurts even if it only happens 1 time in 20 (or less).

Mostly just establishing we're haggling over price. It's not a principle of play that's different you're espousing, but rather a difference in threshold.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Seeing as I understood we had reached a validly called "roll" in each case, I proceeded from that point to narrate only a possible result. I don't recall any sign that it was the whole play loop that was being interrogated. That could have been made clearer, but as it is from my perspective you are saying I didn't adequately answer a question that I didn't answer at all.


I see what you mean. I wish you had made it clear or I had guessed you wanted the whole player loop. As it was, yes. 100%. I said nothing about the parts of the loop I thought were settled. And because I thought them settled, meaningful consequences were perforce already in play. Stipulated largely by you.


This is all good, but again I have nothing to defend. I asked for you to establish the situations and understood all establishing facts to be settled satisfactorily. The question as I understood it was - given we have reached "roll", how are we going to narrate each result? I focused on what you presented, with the assumption that the threadbare facts in each case were not at issue.

This confuses me. I provided details for resolution in a prior thread, and you disclaimed all of those as pointless because you needed a goal to determine if a roll was needed at all, because the goal would tell you what consequences were meaningful, I recall. So, I backed up and gave you goals. I honestly felt that the third one would get dismissed (again, I chose it because it was a purely internal goal and not an external one) as not sufficient, but you chose to engage them. Don't put this choice on me -- if you assumed everything was stipulated or that you had to treat these as requiring checks, that was your assumption. I didn't propose this at all, and was instead backing up to the point where you insisted I had to start. Given that you felt entirely free to invent new details for all of them (and told me so more than once), I'm really struggling to understand how you're now telling me this now. You certainly didn't appear at all constrained in your responses by any established fiction, and told me you felt you had to establish such fiction because it wasn't present.

This is an odd pathway to insist that the blame here is mine.

Take 1. If there is a ritual at the top of a cliff consequences might well come down to time. You'd repeatedly asked about no progress results so I guessed that it was that result you wished to be narrated. No progress. One or a string of awful rolls stymy the player completely. If that happened, the ritual must complete or our putative meaningful consequences are not meaningful at all. If the ritual completes and you turn out the lights, you've hung too much on a climb check. Therefore the worst consequence must be open-ended in some way. Having run OOTA I know that even something as apocalyptic as summoning a demon lord can play out to an interesting campaign: it seemed the obvious candidate and I assumed we were both aware of that broader context.

No, I had no consequences at all in mind. I was trying to elicit how you imagined "meaningful consequences" originated. My initial attempt revolved around questioning the fictional inputs into a check, but you disclaimed these and insisted on needing a larger picture. I complied. I didn't have any consequences at all in mind -- it was investigating how you did things. The answers were rather confusing, though, even given this claim here -- the first directly engaged the goal provided, the second tangentially did by introduction of new fiction not present in the goal but mostly just saying no progress, and the last didn't engage the goal fiction at all and went all in on no progress. So, yeah, still not understanding what you're asserting is clear, because your answers were not clear.

If you want to talk about my narrations in these cases further we can do that, but only if we are discussing narration of result of a validly called "roll": the question I was answering. Or we can revisit them with better questions, which would for e.g. require my exploring how "roll" was rightly reached.

[EDIT To adjust and assume good faith as I can see that I assumed bad faith up thread.]

I put my questions about specific narrations as asides. I've been consistent in my questioning of the results as I just stated above -- they were a mishmash of using a check to resolve fiction that wasn't an input into the check and also a generous helping of no progress hidden under some narration that didn't really change the situation.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think this thread prove that DnD is game with high intellectual and philosophical concept.

Just try to resolve the “secret door case” we are on the same level of Greek philosopher who were asking who come first the object or the idea of the object.

Debating of the existence of the door until players find it, we are just in quantum physics science, when they realize that the experimenter influence the results at quantum level.

Debating on shared fiction, we just take the path of collective unconsciousness of Carl Jung.

we can be proud of our community.

Um, not really. We aren't establishing any philosophical questions about causes, because it's fiction -- there are no actual causes, just what's authored. It's about how we can choose to author fiction. This approach to the question you have here already assumes that the authored causality matters in a way that is similar to the real world, but this was addressed way upthread -- it's not. Instead, and such semblance of causality is merely a product of our non-causal imaginings and is only subject to preference.

 

[Ovinomancer]

@Ovinomancer perhaps we need to proceed like this: tell me what the doubt is. Supply the question plainly. I'm happy to work in good faith to interrogate my own arguments. As noted above, if I mistake your question, then it can't be surprising if we end up in dispute about what was learned.

Had you said something like - let's see each step on the way to reaching "roll" so we see how roll was called based on meaningful consequences. Then I would count valid the subsequent interrogation. As it is, that's not what I answered so any subsequent interrogation is invalidated.

And in hindsight, I feel like that really was your actual question, but that was absolutely opaque to me. I understood that in each case "roll" had been rightly called, and we solely wanted to look at how the results were going to be narrated.

If I am right about your real question, then I can see where your subsequent comments are coming from. Hopefully you can see that I answered a very different question... and when the question changed ( from my perspective) that felt like moving goalposts.

Again, I don't know how you got to that assumption since you flat rejected that when I was looking at rolls directly -- you called into question the need to even have a roll, and said you had to have goals to determine if a rolls was needed. Since this fit with your assertion that you needed to know what meaningful consequences were available prior to calling for a roll (and would not if you couldn't see one), I provided goals as a first step to see what generated sufficient rolls. To that I provided a dire goal with certain high level negative impacts if not successful, a goal that was entirely about determining the truth value of something in game, and a goal that was entirely internal with no external impacts if missed or delayed. Again, you're blaming me for the assumptions you made. I was supplying exactly what you asked for, and only that. That's why the only bit of fiction I stipulated was that the cliff was the same in all examples so that we had a reasonable basis for comparison (ie, not different cliffs) if and when a roll was called for and we examined how the right and left arrows were created and why. I talked about this in a previous reply to you.

 

[clearstream]

This confuses me. I provided details for resolution in a prior thread, and you disclaimed all of those as pointless because you needed a goal to determine if a roll was needed at all, because the goal would tell you what consequences were meaningful, I recall. So, I backed up and gave you goals. I honestly felt that the third one would get dismissed (again, I chose it because it was a purely internal goal and not an external one) as not sufficient, but you chose to engage them.

I engaged them as I understood you to have established everything up to the point of roll. Therefore accepting that a meaningful consequence was in play, and narrating the result.

Don't put this choice on me -- if you assumed everything was stipulated or that you had to treat these as requiring checks, that was your assumption.

Yes, it was my assumption. I cannot see how you can possibly interpret my answers as explicating the whole loop!? A helpful query might have been to reiterate your intended question. That would have repaired my assumption.

I didn't propose this at all, and was instead backing up to the point where you insisted I had to start. Given that you felt entirely free to invent new details for all of them (and told me so more than once), I'm really struggling to understand how you're now telling me this now. You certainly didn't appear at all constrained in your responses by any established fiction, and told me you felt you had to establish such fiction because it wasn't present.

No, I aimed to show that in narrating result a DM is free to add to fiction, perhaps bringing in elements that follow well from previous play.

This is an odd pathway to insist that the blame here is mine.

That's fair. I misunderstood the question. That is why I felt so vividly (and wrongly, as it turns out) that you were shifting the goalposts, creating gotchas. I assumed you asked one question. You upbraided me on quite another.

No, I had no consequences at all in mind. I was trying to elicit how you imagined "meaningful consequences" originated. My initial attempt revolved around questioning the fictional inputs into a check, but you disclaimed these and insisted on needing a larger picture. I complied. I didn't have any consequences at all in mind -- it was investigating how you did things.

Accepted, based on what you have said. But really, how on Earth did you read explication of a full play loop into my answers? Or even an attempt at same?!

The answers were rather confusing, though, even given this claim here -- the first directly engaged the goal provided, the second tangentially did by introduction of new fiction not present in the goal but mostly just saying no progress, and the last didn't engage the goal fiction at all and went all in on no progress. So, yeah, still not understanding what you're asserting is clear, because your answers were not clear.

Perforce.