D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[AbdulAlhazred]

I disagree with this just a little bit. The scope of play HAS broadened, but it still includes skilled play. The broad nature of today's game means that you can play your way and I can play mine. The difference is that I'm not arguing to hurt your way of play.

Nobody is 'hurting your way of play' Max, that's ridiculous. Anyway, by your definition its practically impossible to damage your free will, lol. I won't even get into the ugly ramifications in the real world of your position, but suffice it to say they're super ugly.

 

[Maxperson]

They are addressing exactly the same question, when is a person able to meaningfully decide things? To be an agent, you have to be able to control your fate in some meaningful way, not simply toss dice.

No. Meaning is something you are adding. It's something that is important for you to have when you engage your agency, but not important to agency itself. Different things can address the same topic.

 

[Maxperson]

Nobody is 'hurting your way of play' Max, that's ridiculous.

Removal of Rule 0 actively harms traditional play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Removal of Rule 0 actively harms traditional play.

Meh, I'm not particularly convinced of that, but when did I say any rule of any game should be removed? Are you implying that I'm a bad guy because I play games that don't have that rule and work fine and you find that threatening? If not, I have NO idea what you're talking about. You can have any old 5e or whatever you want, there's like a billion games out there which I'm sure meet your criteria, they aren't going away.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, if you think about it, in the "explore the dungeons of Greyhawk Castle" days of classic D&D, the situation "there are 2 doors, you have no idea what is behind either one" is not really a PROBLEM. First of all the players should have the sort of experience necessary to try to find out (IE listening, etc.). Failing that, they aught to be prepared to slam and spike a door if they see some terribly monster behind it, etc. Finally, there's NO OTHER GOAL except to traverse every room of the dungeon and get all the treasures. Nor does a monster form an absolute guarantee of a bad outcome, you could roll really well on a reaction check. Maybe you just hand your iron rations to the ogres, close the door, and move on...

In other words, the open nature of the game, where you can try anything, is always supposed to be your answer to limited information and constrained choice. The problem is when you get into more trad play where the game becomes a LOT more open in one sense, but a lot more plotted as well, potentially. Then you can arrive at a point where, yes, you can 'do anything', but there's nothing to distinguish one thing from the other thing. I'd note that this also now drags in considerations of variability in goals, which classic Gygax D&D doesn't need to consider (lootz and XP, there is nothing else).

This is why I prefer classic over trad.

 

[Enrahim2]

Yes, I'm aware of this. That's why I call it railroading, because all the thinking about how things would work - that it to say, the authorship of situation, stakes and consequences - is being done by one person, ie the GM.

I have not have a chance to read trough this thread, but this one seem to keep comming up. Could you please try to find a different word for your concept/feeling? Railroad is established as one of the extremes in the railroad-sandbox axis debate. However your concept clearly encompasses even the richest of classic sandboxes. Hence you are clearly talking about something else. Could sightseeing be a more aproperiate and less inflaming term to use?

Louvre is huge with a lot of different ways to go about watching the suff there, but you are unlikely to actually get your own work displayed there by just visiting. This seem more like the experience you are describing. And I havent heard about any railroad tracks trough that place.

 

[Aldarc]

Hey, maybe that held true in the 1980s but these days I got no more market dominance than you do!

When you are playing D&D and its ilk, that aligns with you the lion's share of the market. There is D&D, and then there is everything else.

Exactly - you've seen the issue I'm raising and, while jokingly turning it back on me, are also agreeing it's a problem. No, the sniper shouldn't auto-hit in D&D; my point is that the sniper shouldn't auto-hit period, and that rolls for actions of any character should be made by the person controlling that character, in this case - as the sniper is an NPC - by the GM.

The problem with your sniper example entails the fact that the GM is not playing by the rules. That is the fundamental problem you are failing to mention in the above.

In D&D the play process of the game dictates that the GM make an attack roll for the sniper against the PC's armor class. It would break the rules if the GM bypassed the attack roll to declare a hit.* It's the equivalent of "rocks fall, you die!"

In Dungeon World, the play process of the game dictates that (1) the GM declares that the sniper attacks, (2) the GM asks the PCs what they do, and then (3) the PCs react to what's happening, and then possibly (4) triggering an appropriate PC Move, such as Defy Danger. The results of the PC's move roll determines the results, which may possibly include damage but also avoiding the hit entirely. So it's not an auto-hit at all. It can only become an auto-hit when the GM bypasses the rules to Cause Harm right out of the gate and ignore the required play process, which is equivalent to "rocks fall, you die!" This is what you were doing with the sniper causing damage. You were breaking the rules of Dungeon World.

* A key difference is that the GM in D&D is potentially authorized to fudge the dice and declare that the sniper hits - even if we may both agree in our dislike of fudging - and fudging is not possible in Dungeon World since the GM doesn't roll.

I would add here that Dungeon World, in this regard, is not too dissimilar from "defense rolls" in some trad games like the Cypher System or even OSR games like The Black Hack. In these games, the GM doesn't roll to make attacks (as they only declare the actions of the NPCs) and instead the player rolls for defense against attacks. It's also not that different in some concept from D&D's use of saving throws. The GM declares the action of a spell, and the PCs then may roll to avoid it. It would be equally egregious to the rules in the aforementioned systems if you had declared that the sniper hit and damaged the players without first having them make Defense rolls.

OK, so the rules aren't even consistent in how (the players of) NPCs and PCs interact with them on something as basic as combat. That's a deal-killer right there.

If it doesn't mechanically work the same when the positions are reversed - i.e. when it's the PCs shooting at some Goblins the Goblins get to Defy Danger etc. - that's a huge red flag as to how this game is designed. D&D has issues in this area as well, don't get me wrong, but nowhere near to this extent.

The rules of Dungeon World are consistent. It just doesn't work according to your preferences.

 

[Lanefan]

You also said D&D 'needs to' be peoples' first game because D&D is somehow unique in being generic. Which it does a bad job at,

One could argue the WotC editions aren't the best at being generic, but I've found the TSR versions are - with work - surprisingly flexible in what they can be relatively seamlessly kitbashed to do.

If that's what it takes to teach them some humility and how to play a cooperative storytelling game without bogarting control, then let's do this.

Thing is, not everyone wants to play a storytelling game. If they did, the various storygames would be light years more popular and-or mainstream than they are.

As for "teach them some humility"...well, as the original premise of the thread where the DM wanted to inflict some humility on some players showed us, that doesn't work well in either direction.

 

[Lanefan]

D&D combat is fine, I don't have an issue with it either. It is, however, NOT the ideal way to handle all sorts of genre. For one thing, the way levels and hit points work high level people are pretty much able to ignore attacks. There's no defined way in 5e to assassinate a 10th level PC, the character is NOT going to be killed, even by the nastiest of surprise attacks.

Which IMO is one of the flaws in 5e design, but that's a whole other discussion.

At best it would have to include magic, poison, probably both before death was even on the table. This is actually fine for a power progression game like D&D, but it precludes a lot of interesting options for sure! PbtA games which feature combat (some don't) are much less likely to be portraying neigh invincible super-heroic PCs. Even a level 10 Dungeon World PC has maybe 3-4 points of armor and 25 hit points, where monsters that he's likely facing can easily do more than 10 points of damage in a single move, and if the fiction reads like "you couldn't possibly survive this" then you don't... (well, you get Death's Door, have fun!). Its much more a game of action/adventure where combat is definitely going to happen, but it isn't the overwhelming focus.

Actually, that shift in focus from combat to something else (drama?) is perhaps the biggest underlying difference between the two types of game, even though each can still somewhat be used for the other.

Like in our Stonetop game, there was a violent confrontation in the first session, and now in the 2nd session a pretty big battle, but these aren't the FOCUS of the game, they are simply situations that can come up sometimes.

This could be a matter of perception as well. If combat is quick to resolve in your game then it might not seem like there's a focus on it, where due to the greater granularity and more in-depth rules the same series of events and battles in a D&D game would take longer to resolve, thus making it look and feel like there's a greater focus on combat where in fact you're doing the same things as the other game.

That's not very clear, so let me bang out a quick example of what I'm thinking about here.

Two games - one D&D and one, let's say, Stonetop - end up playing out the same series of events (1) which in hindsight went like this:

--- introduction - the five PCs get to know each other a bit
--- initial investigations in the starting town, a couple of characters have important questions (2) they need answered
--- those answers lead to those characters (and the rest of the party, they're keen) needing to travel to Karnos, another town some days away
--- en route to Karnos the party are beset by bandits, a fairly easy combat (and a useful learning tool if any players are new to the system)
--- once in Karnos, a character needs to find a shady contact; this leads to some exploration and discovery of first the town and then of that character as he learns some unpleasant things he has to try and square with
--- this new info (3) points that character to an island just offshore where might lie some resolution to his plight; the place has a well-earned and well-known bad reputation but the PCs decide to go there anyway
--- on arriving at the island the PCs learn the hard way it's a base for pirates who really don't appreciate visitors; the PCs get spotted quicky, and a big long sprawling battle follows.

In D&D, that last combat could easily take as much or more table time as all the rest of this put together, and the bandit battle would take time as well; thus about 3/4 of the total time of play ends up spent on combat. Thus, even though the games ended up generating exactly the same amount of story with exactly the same number of combats against the same opponents, D&D looks more combat-focused just because of the time it takes to play through a battle.

Then add to that the currently-prevailing mindset among D&D players that combat is the go-to solution for any situation, and yeah - it can quickly become all combat, all the time.

(1) - let's not quibble about who authored these events or how; that's not the point, as they could happen in pretty much any system
(2) - related to their goals, bonds, interests, etc.
(3) - whatever this info is, it naturally follows on from (2) and is related to such

 

[Lanefan]

Well, if you think about it, in the "explore the dungeons of Greyhawk Castle" days of classic D&D, the situation "there are 2 doors, you have no idea what is behind either one" is not really a PROBLEM. First of all the players should have the sort of experience necessary to try to find out (IE listening, etc.). Failing that, they aught to be prepared to slam and spike a door if they see some terribly monster behind it, etc. Finally, there's NO OTHER GOAL except to traverse every room of the dungeon and get all the treasures. Nor does a monster form an absolute guarantee of a bad outcome, you could roll really well on a reaction check. Maybe you just hand your iron rations to the ogres, close the door, and move on...

In other words, the open nature of the game, where you can try anything, is always supposed to be your answer to limited information and constrained choice. The problem is when you get into more trad play where the game becomes a LOT more open in one sense, but a lot more plotted as well, potentially. Then you can arrive at a point where, yes, you can 'do anything', but there's nothing to distinguish one thing from the other thing. I'd note that this also now drags in considerations of variability in goals, which classic Gygax D&D doesn't need to consider (lootz and XP, there is nothing else).

I agree with all of this except the bolded; as other goals can and IM long E often do play a large role in what's still otherwise a pretty Gygaxian setup. Even more so as we long ago knocked off giving xp for treasure and in so doing slowed level advancement to a crawl.