D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?

[pemerton]

I don't see much of a point to "the GM has set the mayor to away, how do you wish to proceed" play really. This reads very much like @pemerton's GM's puzzle box, where the GM has set an obstacle and wants players to overcome it by solving the puzzle the GM has created, and so becomes upset when the players deploy an asset to bypass the puzzle solving.

Agreed. (That may not be surprising.)

@pemerton was pretty clear a few times that there should be some kind of check or cost to deploying these assets -- the idea that this is just "the players make up how they solve it this time and the GM is powerless" is a strawman of large proportion. Your sister pens you into the appointment book? Well, she wants something for this or you need to convince her to do so. Unless it's a resource token of some kinds that is spent, in which case it's still paid for.

Overall, I prefer check-based systems (eg Circles in Burning Wheel and Torchbearer; Streetwise in Classic Traveller) but also enjoy resource-based ones. But I also conceded that, in most versions of D&D, stuff like the helpful sister will probably be done via free roleplaying and negotiation, rather than via expenditure of resources or making a check with a meaningful consequence for failure. I still think this is viable, and that claim is based on the experience of handling it via freeform roleplaying and negotiation in Rolemaster.

Part of what makes freeform approaches viable is that, in the end, the players will confront a challenge or obstacle or demand that it's clear can't be resolved by their PCs' helpful relatives or friends: eg if it's established that the mayor is neither relative or friend; and it's the case that the players (and the PCs) want the mayor to do X; then the players are going to have to come up with some plan of persuading the mayor to do X (or replacing the mayor with their friendly doppelganger who will do X, or whatever other plan they come up with).

And credit where it's due: I'm really just reiterating here a point already made by @Hussar.

The players should never be able to infinitely declare obstacles overcome. That’s boring. There should be risks of failure (rolls) and/or costs (spending limited resources) involved.

So in the sister/mayor example we have a goal (talk to the mayor) and an obstacle (the mayor’s too busy). This should, of course, be tied to a further goal and an obstacle that, hopefully, the mayor can help with. It shouldn’t be a self-contained goal/obstacle unto itself.

We have two ways of handling it. 1) the player simply declares the obstacle overcome and goal attained, or; 2) some risk or cost (or both) to overcoming the obstacle and attaining the goal.

I see no point to 1 as it’s dull and boring.

What's more boring? Having a player decide their PC's sister works for the mayor, and that they will ask her to leave the side gate open? Or having the PCs work through whatever means or resource expenditure the GM had in mind?

I'm with @Hussar - if the players are positing the sister solution, presumably they aren't super-thrilled by the prospect of doing whatever they think the GM would otherwise have them do!

(The idea that this is the first step on an infinite path is of course pretty implausible; everyone at the table recognises that there are limits implicit in the fiction about who the PCs friends and relatives might be, and everyone at the table recognises that at some point the PCs will therefore have to find some non-friend/relative-based solutions to their problems.)

If any and all obstacles are as easily overcome, by simple declaration, we’re not playing a game, much less somehow playing through a story. Because, again, stories have drama and tension.

This claim seems implausible to me - an overgeneralisation. And it also rests on exaggeration.

D&D magic-users from time to time resolve obstacles by simple declaration. That doesn't necessarily prevent there being drama and tension - and I'm not just meaning the tension of do we have enough spells memorised? A lot of people assert that they can experience drama and tension in their free-form social resolution, and that is nothing but simple declarations.

If the discussion about the sister occupies twenty minutes of table time, in which there is consideration of things like whether she and the PC are on good terms, and whether she will get in trouble if the mayor learns who left the side gate open, and whether or not the PCs should offer a sweetener to get her to agree to help them, and a bit of roleplaying of the actual making of the request, then maybe there might be quite a bit of drama and tension. That's really quite context dependent.

you don’t need 2 unless there’s drama and tension to evoke. Time pressure, for example. Unless it really matters that the PCs talk to the mayor right now today, it doesn’t matter that she can’t see you until next week. So they’re willing to risk a setback and/or pay a cost.

Conversely to the above point: if the players decide that their PCs need to see the mayor today, and so are prepared to put in effort to do, that does not guarantee drama and tension. I don't think that working through the GM's conception of how to get into the mayor's house will necessarily be drama-and-tension laden. That will depend very heavily on the fiction that the GM has in mind. Based on my experience, I think there's actually a real risk of it being frustrating, or of turning into comedy (because this sort of thing is very easy to lampoon).

 

[pemerton]

destroying the ring involves traveling to the far end of the world to drop it in a particular volcano.

If we're thinking of this in the context of a RPG, who established that "truth" about the shared fiction? A player, because it provides a solution to the destruction problem? The GM, as a consequence for failure on a lore check? There are a variety of possibilities here, which would reflect both different sorts of participant priorities and suggest different things about the subsequent campaign trajectory.

As a result it's a goal that either needs to be ignored entirely or override the entire campaign

<snip>
[*]GM: Ok guys, you all got the setup & agreed to show up with characters ready to play $campaign
[*]HotDQ

• GM opens with Starting Scene
• Frodo: Actually I have this magic ring that corrupts the bearer that needs to be dropped in a volcano on the other end of the world. I need to go do that cause my character really wants to retire & go live happily ever after with lots of food & drink.
• GM: "Ok your character leaves the group. Start making a PC ready to play this with us

Seriously? Your objection to a Tolkienesque-campaign is that it's not compatible with the GM running their preferred scenario? I mean, why is it not an objection to HotDQ that maybe the players don't care about Tiamat? Why does only the GM's preference as to what sort of fiction to engage with matter?

And it's not like I'm saying anything outside the mainstream. There's an edition of D&D - namely, 4e D&D - that takes the idea of player-authored quests seriously. The obvious upshot of that is that the GM is not in sole control of the trajectory of the fiction; that in choosing what scenes to frame and scenarios to come up with, they have to consider the player-authored quests. If you don't want player-authored quests, or player-authored character backstory and goals, of course that's your prerogative. But in that case you can hardly complain that players are rather passive in their orientation towards the fiction that you serve up to them.

 

[pemerton]

Torvold


Dwarf I guess?

<snip>

Most like porters, one twisted soul likes long distance pale ales.

How is any of that different from deciding that your PC has a sister who works in the mayor's house?

 

[pemerton]

And what if you're playing 5e, and the group doesn't particularly want to experiment? Are we back to players not caring about the world unless they get to invent stuff?

Other than back story and minor incidentals, in traditional play players don't author content for the campaign in-session, particularly invented aspects of in-game reality to solve an in-game problem. This has been the case for traditional play since the beginnings of the game (and yes, i know there are plenty of exceptions that can be pointed to). Are you saying that in groups that have been or are currently engaging in that style of play, few if any of these players engage with the setting? For nearly the last 50 years?

You seem confused about the point of my posts.

I'm not offering an empirical conjecture about the distribution of different sorts of play experiences. Although I think that @Hussar's conjecture is fairly plausible, that is, that where the setting and backstory are almost entirely the province of the GM then there will be a tendency of players not to embed their PCs into the setting with rich connections of friends, family etc. In other words the PCs will look more like Conan in Tower of the Elephant than Conan in People of the Black Circle.

The purpose of my posts is to offer a solution to an actual problem that some posters upthread stated. I don't know how widespread the problem is, but it's clear it has more than zero incidence because some people raised it! I once had the same problem in my RPGing, c 1984/5, and I found a way to solve it. And I've been using variations on that solution, and refinements of it, since.

I'm not sure what a "kicker" is.

It's a player-authored event that occurs, in the fiction, just before play starts. And the event propels the PC into the action in a way that the character, and hence player, can't ignore; it demands action.

Here are examples, from the first session of a 4e Dark Sun game:

The main constraint I imposed was: your kicker somehow has to locate you within Tyr in the context of the Sorcerer-King having been overthrown. The reason for this constraint was (i) I want to be able to use the 4e campaign books, and (ii) D&D relies pretty heavily on group play, and so I didn't want the PCs to be too separated spatially or temporally.

The player of the barbarian came up with something first. Paraphrasing slightly, it went like this:

I was about to cut his head of in the arena, to the adulation of the crowd, when the announcement came that the Sorcerer-King was dead, and they all looked away.​

So that answered the question that another player had asked, namely, how long since the Sorcerer-King's overthrow: it's just happened.

The other gladiator - whose name is "Twenty-nine", that being his number on the inventory of slaves owned by his master - had been mulling over (no pun intended) something about his master having been killed, and so we settled on the following:

I came back from the slave's privies, ready to receive my master's admonition to do a good job before I went out into the arena. But when I got back to the pen my master was dead. So I took the purse with 14 gp from his belt.​

(The 14 gp was the character's change after spending his starting money on gear.)

Discussion of PC backgrounds and the like had already established that the eladrin was an envoy from The Lands Within The Wind, aiming to link up with the Veiled Alliance and thereby to take steps to save his homeland from the consequences of defiling. So his kicker was

My veiled alliance contact is killed in front of me as we are about to meet.​

 

[Willie the Duck]

That's kind of my point; when I see a GM playing "All these problems are players fault!" I roll my damn eyes. Same as any player who thinks every GM is a tyrant in disguise.

I know a guy you do not want to meet.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Trad play trains players to be passive consumers.

Though I should note this changes to some degree once you get outside the D&D sphere, even in games otherwise usually considered trad.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I know a guy you do not want to meet.

Honestly, over my years in the hobby, you'd be surprised at the kind of the guys I've met. I'm rarely surprised any more...

 

[Vaalingrade]

Though I should note this changes to some degree once you get outside the D&D sphere, even in games otherwise usually considered trad.

Yeah, 'My Way or the Highway; DM is God' is pretty much a D&D-alike trope at this point.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, 'My Way or the Highway; DM is God' is pretty much a D&D-alike trope at this point.

Well, over an above that, some games just have a focus on some degree of connection to the setting that D&D derivatives rarely do. RuneQuest rarely has PCs as footloose adventurers (it can, but its just not how the game usually rolls), and its almost impossible to be that disconnected in a superhero game.

 

[Cadence]

How is any of that different from deciding that your PC has a sister who works in the mayor's house?

I'll make that "deciding in play that your PC has a sister who works in the mayor's house".

I think these two questions in particular make a difference to me.

(1) Does it require much mental overhead by me the player that is distinct from figuring out what my character would do? (Coming up with a name or beverage seems fine vs. coming up with a battle cry on the fly that sounds good that my character would have already known).

(2) Does it give me an in game advantage? (Coming up in play with some arbitrary beverage or name that ads flavor that may show up again vs. deciding in play where they work when it's relevant to accomplishing something).

If they are both no, then I think I'm all for it.

In the first case as yes means I'm taking time in game not being my character, and possibly establishing something in fiction that is worse than if I'd done it later. ("Wow, that was a really bad name and battle cry I came up with last night...."). It's not what I want to spend my time in game doing.

In the second case, I wonder if a yes feels for me kind of the way that fudging seems to for some others -- I can't stop thinking about it. In their case they can't stop thinking about if each die roll is fudged. In my case, if I can drop things into fiction, I start thinking about what I'd like to drop into fiction next instead of what my character would do. (It's like I have a ring of limited capability to alter reality on my character sheet now, and find myself spending time wondering how I could use it). Instead of having my character search their memory (via DM ask) to see if anyone around the area might have a barrel of something explosive, I make a story up that gets me the explosive as easily as possible. Instead of checking the area (via DM ask) for a ladder to get over the wall, I just find a ladder in the convenient spot. Instead of wracking my characters memory (via DM ask) if I know someone who might be able to heal us for free in this strange town, I'm just related to Nurse Joy, and every town has one of those.