D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[TwoSix]

Your whole conception of RPGing seems to me one giant pandering to a GM who cannot handle any sort of creative collaboration.

Man, analytical @pemerton is fun, but pissed-off @pemerton is straight up fire.

 

[Oofta]

So please explain, then: how do the players know what their PCs are seeing and experiencing, other than the GM telling them? I mean, you've told me, repeatedly, that they can't imagine it for themselves.

Where do the PCs' friends come from? How do they know who bakes the best bread in the village, other than by asking the GM?

How is the experience of playing the character any different from having to look up a Lonely Planet every few minutes to work out the lie of the land?

You really question how I know what my PC sees? The DM describes the scene, perhaps I as for clarification.

I work with the DM on my back story. At times we work together to flesh out aspects of history or downtime. If I come across something I as a player don't know I ask the DM. If they're uncertain if my character would know they ask for an appropriate knowledge roll.

The entirety of a work of fiction of any kind is never 100% comprehensive. I don't have to know every casual acquaintance my PC has. Many of them come from NPCs, or as I said from my background.

What I don't get to do, and don't want to do, is spout lore about the world around me. I don't declare that a building exists. I don't get to decide if there's a blacksmith in town, although frequently the DM will say there is one even if they hadn't declared it ahead of time.

I find it hard to accept that you truly don't understand these concepts and that how we approach the game is just a preference.

 

[pemerton]

I’ve actually gotten paid to write about running and playing doomed campaigns - that is, where everybody playing knows up front that the PCs will die, and what matters is how, when and where, and what comes of it.

I've never played or GMed this, but it's an interesting genre (if that's the right word). @AbdulAlhazred has posted in the past about a "doomed space station" scenario he once ran.

One thing I think is really interesting about these scenarios/this genre of RPGing is that it shows how railroading vs protagonism can be really very orthogonal to the "objective" or "external" trajectory of events in the fiction, which are all heading to an inevitable place that everyone knows. That, in turn, tends to disrupt or upend the rather ubiquitous but to me quite frustrating tendency in conversations about RPGing to frame player choice in terms of where does my PC go? or what does my PC touch? as opposed to (say) what judgement does my PC make and act on? or who does my PC move?

 

[Gradine]

This is just a general call, to all of the people in this thread, is to try to be a bit more charitable when trying to understand or describe another's preferred styles of play.

Any given two people are describing four very different games, only two of which match actual reality.

 

[pemerton]

You really question how I know what my PC sees? The DM describes the scene, perhaps I as for clarification.

<snip>

If I come across something I as a player don't know I ask the DM. If they're uncertain if my character would know they ask for an appropriate knowledge roll.

That's exactly what I said. Which you said was BS!

I don't have to know every casual acquaintance my PC has.

<snip>

What I don't get to do, and don't want to do, is spout lore about the world around me. I don't declare that a building exists. I don't get to decide if there's a blacksmith in town, although frequently the DM will say there is one even if they hadn't declared it ahead of time.

This is all the stuff that I described. You said my description was BS, but here it all is from your own keyboard! And this is the stuff that I find radically non-immersive, because it is nothing like actually being a person moving about a world that I know.

I mean, I have dozens of friends and acquaintances, some more casual and others less-so, whom I might ring or email if I want to talk about something. I know dozens of buildings that I might seek out for utilitarian purposes, or because I enjoy looking at them or being in them.

I can spout lore about the world I live in all day long.

If my PC doesn't even know as much about their world as a kindergarten child would, I cannot immerse. It's ridiculous.

 

[Vaalingrade]

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.

Humility had nothing to do with it. That was punishment for the outrage of Good characters killing the guys falsely imprisoning them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure.

I'm aware of this. It's not remotely immersive. As an experience, it has ZERO resemblance to actually moving through a place and among people that one knows.

I mean, I've once or twice travelled through places that were, to me, very foreign, relying on a Lonely Planet. And the technique of GM narration is not super-immersive even for that sort of experience.

That's one option, sure. There are others too. Just sticking to games mentioned in this thread, consider how AW and DW handle this ("ask questions and build on the answers") or how BW and Classic Traveller handle it (Wises and Circes in the first system, Streetwise in the second).

Sure. I'm not confused about your preferences. All I'm saying is that for me it is only immersive if my goal is to play a space alien.

Fair enough. This is why we have to agree to disagree. Neither of us is going to come around to the others point of view, but I think we both understand each other.

Good gaming!

 

[TwoSix]

What I don't get to do, and don't want to do, is spout lore about the world around me. I don't declare that a building exists. I don't get to decide if there's a blacksmith in town, although frequently the DM will say there is one even if they hadn't declared it ahead of time.

Is it really that hard to understand that asking the DM if the blacksmith is actually your cousin Razul might harm immersion? Of course you know what your cousin looks like!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Man, analytical @pemerton is fun, but pissed-off @pemerton is straight up fire.

What's the point of that? What value does intentional antagonism bring to any of this?

 

[Autumnal]

One thing I think is really interesting about these scenarios/this genre of RPGing is that it shows how railroading vs protagonism can be really very orthogonal to the "objective" or "external" trajectory of events in the fiction, which are all heading to an inevitable place that everyone knows. That, in turn, tends to disrupt or upend the rather ubiquitous but to me quite frustrating tendency in conversations about RPGing to frame player choice in terms of where does my PC go? or what does my PC touch? as opposed to (say) what judgement does my PC make and act on? or who does my PC move?

I agree a lot about doomed or mostly/probably-doomed gaming in this regard. I find it intensely immersive. When everyone involved is in the groove, because the stakes are the characters’ very essence. “When all else fails, what remains? Who am I? How will the world be different because I went there and did that?” And the answers can range from Ligotti’s “There is nowhere to go, and nothing to do. There is nothing to know, and nobody to be.” to “Your sacrifice saved us all.” I love that, as may be obvious in the way I write about it.