D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[FrozenNorth]

Context, old chap.

A consistent failure rate of 50% for a baseball batter would be astonishingly good: he'd be batting .500, where the all-time record for a season is just a bit over .400.

A saleswoman who can close sales to 50% of the customers she interacts with would, in most cases, be doing amazingly well.

Well, the context is after playing an RPG with me, 50% of people don’t want to do so again, so even in context, that’s pretty terrible.

I mean, those are root canal numbers.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Clearly.

My point is around situations where the threat and follow-up are disconnected in time.

I use it as a simple example of a hard move that's disconnected in time from the associated soft move but which still follows logically in the fiction.

So you've answered my question (thanks for that!) but, sadly, it's the answer I kind of expected but didn't want to see: I can't ever truly ambush or even surprise the PCs - they always get a warning.

But, I'd guess the PCs can take steps to ambush their NPC foes and, if lucky, drop those foes before they even knew trouble was upon them. So how is that fair, in terms of in-fiction consistency?

That is too harsh. I can ambush you but I cannot simply decide that some totally hidden from you fiction that happens off screen leads without warning to a bullet in your brain. Remember, there's no 'to hit' in DW. A hard move like that will be serious damage or death. All that may be needed is Defy Danger, which is no more forgiving than an attack roll in D&D. However some logic for why this is a thing should have been surfaced to the players at some point.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Maybe that is the problem. I don't think that trad gaming needs your defense from a bunch of nobodies on the forum.


My honest preference would be a moment of self-awareness, if not some self-reflection, that you are punching down from a playstyle preference that enjoys a position of mass market dominance against a playstyle preference that gets regularly marginalized, othered, and disregarded with "bespoke" language on this forum.


You are aware that the article Six Cultures of Play was written by an OSR-enthusiast blogger? If you read the section on Story Games, it's pretty clear that his opinion about them is neither particularly high nor all that interested in depicting them with any justice.


At this point, I would love to see you have something positive to say about anything in these forums.

First of all, the personal comments are not appreciated.

Secondly, to be fair, Ron Edwards' opinion of simulation in his categories was so low and without justice that he doesn't even consider what I value to be a real playstyle. Everyone has their biases.

Thirdly, "punching down" in this context sounds like an excuse to freely denigrate something because its popular, and everyone's supposed to just be ok with that. I don't hold with that.

Finally, I feel positively about plenty of things. I generally like 5e (but not WotC's recent stewardship of it), I love Level Up, and am generally in favor of the OSR approach. I also love Star Trek and Babylon 5, and have expressed my appreciation of those franchises on these forums. Please don't mischaracterize me because I don't like narrative games and am unafraid to talk about that.

 

[Oofta]

Yes, it does. You have a weird, Manichean perception of a “bad DM”, sitting in the dark, twirling his mustache about how he’s going to screw over the players. Of course, no rule is going to stop that guy, but he’s also a comparative rarity.

Good rules will however assist with the considerably more numerous:

• newbie DMs who think that DMing is about telling the cool story they have in their heads rather than what the characters want;

So ... listen to the advice in Chapter 8 of the DMG where it talks about Heroes Who Matter and and Something for All Player Types?

• stressed DMs that are worried that allowing players to do something cool not covered by the rules “this one time” will create a precedent that will be exploited “against them”;

Which has nothing to do with the common thread in 5E of rulings over rules? Although this sound like you want to enforce the "rule of cool" which I don't personally care for.

• time-crunched DMs who spent too much prep time on world-building to the detriment of the stuff the party interacted with; and, of course,

Again, chapter 8, A Clear Focus on the Present.

• non-DMs who see a book’s worth of impenetrable and poorly-organized cruft and decide that there is no way that they will try DMing.

This is about the only thing I'll sort of agree with and that Crawford has admitted is a problem. They're redesigning for the 2024 edition. But I also think the criticism is overblown. It is far easier to learn how to DM than it has ever been even if the DMG needs improvement and reorganization.

 

[pemerton]

I'm done having this conversation. You know full well that railroading does not apply to the play structure of D&D as it is used by everyone else. You can express your feelings without using a pejorative.

Presumably you can express your feeings without using the pejorative "artificial". Yet you choose not to:

But yes, having something always happen on a failure other than simply not accomplishing my goal feels artificial to me.

And having the GM establish stakes and consequences feels like railroading to me. I mean, you tell me I know full well that it doesn't, but guess what: I know me better than you know me.[

You're being told that the default for D&D is that only the DM can establish setting elements.

Says who?

In 4e that is not the default: look at the discussion in the PHB on player-authored quests, and the discussion of the same in the DMG which tells the GM they should "say 'yes'" to those quests.

In OA, published for AD&D in the mid-80s, it is assumed that the player will work with the GM in establishing details of family, martial arts masters, etc - at least, that's how we did it back then and there was nothing in any rulebook, and Dragon magazine etc to suggest that we were doing something crazy. The Puffin book "What is Dungeons & Dragons" which came out in the early 80s, and which we'd read around the same time OA came out, presented examples of players authoring setting elements as part of their PC backstory without any sense of controversy or departure from a "default".

You seem to think that it is important to keep mentioning that this is a general D&D thread. But as far as I can tell, what you really want is for everyone to treat your narrow approach to D&D play as a normative baseline for all RPGing.

 

[Faolyn]

Er...the trying times ARE the dull slog, aren't they?

No. Trying times should be... trying. There should be the uncertainty of things to come, and the fear that they can get worse battling against the hope that they can get better.

But doing multiple attempts to get past an area, especially when it relies so heavily on a random die roll... it's just dull.

Either way, that's a hella cool workaround idea you lot came up with!

Thanks! It definitely threw the GM for a loop.

 

[pemerton]

Ron Edwards' opinion of simulation in his categories was so low and without justice that he doesn't even consider what I value to be a real playstyle.

As a matter of biography and criticism this is inaccurate. Edwards's is one of the world's biggest fans of Champions, has an incredibly deep appreciation of RuneQuest, and frankly gives the best advice for GMing Rolemaster that I've ever read. (Far better than anything ever written in an official RM publication.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, you have called certain sorts of play "artificial", and when challenged did not feel any obligation to change your description.

Given those norms of conversation, I don't really see that I am obliged to keep secret my own opinions and feelings about railroading.

I don't fully agree with this. Nearly every RPG that I'm aware of actively elides many of those activities, in the interests of "excitement" or "engagement" or similar sorts of concerns. (To continue the comparison to film, there is no RPGing I'm aware of that resembles Warhol's Sleep.)

Furthermore, the worlds of RPGs are normally highly contrived, in order to generate opportunities for action adventure.

Some of those series do have rather weak authorship of character, with the character being little more than a device through which the action plays out. It's invidious to give examples, because inevitably they impugn someone's favourite show, but Castle past season 4 strikes me as an obvious one.

Still, for a certain sort of character, in a certain sort of (very unrealistic) world, it is possible to have character play out against a rather procedural backdrop. Rather than TV, I think a better illustration of this is super hero comics - I'm thinking to some extent of 60s/70s and even some 80 Spider-Man, but especially Claremont-era X-Men.

There is a RPG that emulates this: MHRP. The players' contributions (expressions of character) and the GM's contributions (provision of super-villains to confront) play out together in the game. But to make it work, the players are given all sorts of capacity to affect scene elements, background, NPCs etc that - given your posts in this and other threads - I would expect you to reject rather forcefully.

I do reject those things, but I did my best. I own MHR and read it extensively, although I never had the opportunity to play. I just can't get behind players inventing scene elements in an RPG; call it a personal failing if you must. I also really don't like aspects or similar aspects in a game. They really rub me the wrong way.

And my issue with the railroad thing is not that you're expressing your feelings about trad/classic play. It's that you are doing so in a way that sounds objective, like your definition of the word is everyone's definition.

 

[pemerton]

i guess it may differ if you interpret it to mean more that the 'neutral GM' acts purely the interface and mouthpiece between the players and the game world, the gameworld does not care one jot about the players wants and desires, what would be most fun or dramatic or lethal in any given circumstance, the world merely is and things happen irregardless of how the players will feel about them because that is how the world would be.

The gameworld is not a real thing. It has no cares. It does not have its own agency, nor its own nature, not its own causal influence.

In saying that the gameworld is what it is and that things happen regardless of how the players feel about them you are prioritising the GM's vision of the fiction over the players. Of course that's your prerogative to do so. But how can you be shocked that some RPGers - eg me - would see that as railroading?

 

[pemerton]

my issue with the railroad thing is not that you're expressing your feelings about trad/classic play. It's that you are doing so in a way that sounds objective, like your definition of the word is everyone's definition.

Railroading, of RPGing, means the GM exercising authority to the detriment of the players' capacity to shape the fiction. I'm explaining what I take that to be.