D&D General Why the resistance to D&D being a game?

[Thomas Shey]

Matching up with the fiction is more important to me than degree of gamism.

Yes, I think most of us know by now, Micah.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You're using a VTT? They tend to make sure everything is covered whether needed or not. I have things on my Hero Lab Online sheet I never need to look at.

(Now, over time you can accumulate a lot of feats, which can add up in the teens, but even a lot of those are things that are reactive in some circumstances. It can still be hard to remember sometimes, but its not a steady-state load. I don't need to know I have Evasion unless I'm making a Reflex save, and then three of the four results it doesn't matter with).

I am not using a VTT, just a very colorful multi-page character sheet full of widgets i was assured I needed to keep with the expected encounters and the rest of the party.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I am not going to argue that D&D combat system is even remotely realistic, but funnily enough a man killing a lion barehanded reportedly actually happened in Uganda 2022.

(Not going to link the article as it had bloody pictures, but you can probably find it if you want.)

Seems pretty unbelievable and maybe it was a hoax, but I can see it happening as some sort of an extreme freak incident.

But I really feel that normal animals are weirdly underpowered in D&D and stop being a threat pretty early on.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A board game is very, very, rarely an example of interactive storytelling. It’s more like an analog video game. You are experiencing a pre-packaged story (no matter how branching or non-linear), not telling a new one as a group activity.

And again, open-ended situations are literally meaningless unless they contain elements of and lend themselves to telling stories.

Absolutely no one would play a game that is just as open as D&D, but devoid of any story elements to use to tell a story interactively. Game Piece 1 is meaningless. Rogue has meaning. The difference is story, not that one is more open-ended.

I don't think this is a defensible position. In fact I think there ARE games which are pretty much open ended. For example, Magic: the Gathering. There is not even a possibility of constructing a canonical description of all possible play. You can't even characterize play with a few generalizations. Yet there is no necessity, and little tendency, to construct a narrative in play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think this is a bad argument - Even if someone is okay with something supernatural in some way, that doesn’t imply that they need to be okay with anything supernatural in any way.

I'm mystified by what your response has to do with the statement that D&D fighters (or other PCs) are clearly supernatural. I mean, once my sister's 1e bard just casually jumped off a 200' cliff, because the damage she suffered was basically trivial and easily survivable (I forget what the motivation was, she wanted to get to the bottom fast for whatever reason). If that isn't supernatural, what is? Heck, my ranger character jumped off a huge cliff into a sea of high level demons, carved a path through them all, and laughed the whole way. Sure seemed supernatural to me!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm fine with humans being more realistic in both directions. All it would take is a little research before you design. It can and has been done by people who aren't WotC.

Yet you prefer to play D&D. I'm guessing its because the play experience of games like Aftermath (which IIRC is quite realistic) kinda suck. People don't want to RP normal humans! At least most of the time.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I find most of the "level appropriate" mechanics pretty odd and hard to coherently justify.

Unlike most of the other mechanics, they impact setting parameters in service to game balance rather than provide mechanics for impacting the setting.

So I have a hard time reckoning how they make sense. Not that I don't try.

Honest talk here.

Any game balance mechanic will sometimes make demands on setting issues. That's why some people hate them. They're a tradeoff, and one some people are not willing to make (and other people don't care about at all).

Its just I'm not sold that most people don't do it all the time in an ad-hoc and possibly unconscious way, because if that wasn't done too many games would probably turn into a TPK or equivalent more often than I suspect most people want to deal with, gritty or not.

(This is excluding the people who simply fudge their way around it regularly).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I don't think this is a defensible position. In fact I think there ARE games which are pretty much open ended. For example, Magic: the Gathering. There is not even a possibility of constructing a canonical description of all possible play. You can't even characterize play with a few generalizations. Yet there is no necessity, and little tendency, to construct a narrative in play.

What on earth do you think I’m arguing, that this makes sense to you as a response?

Whether non-RPGs center on storytelling is completely irrelevant. MtG has overlap with fantasy RPGs, but isn’t one. Okay? That is so irrelevant to the topic it isn’t even out of left field it’s on the wrong continent playing a different game.

Edit: If you make a character, and describe what they do in a made up scenario amongst other made up characters, you are telling a story.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I do my best to state my opinions as just that, and have no problem taking the hit when I forget, or accepting my error when I make one. I see no reason why other people can't do the same.

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you don't realize you're doing this, but you've moved the goalposts at least twice in our discussion; the previous way you did it was to talk about arguments, which I addressed. Now you want it to be about any exchange at all.

Which is it? The poster you responded to was not setting up an argument; he was making an offhand comment that they were glad your approach had not been chosen. I think expecting people to be as precise as you want under those conditions is unreasonable.

 

[Guest 7042500]

Yeah. Falling should just kill you after a point, and natural healing should take much longer IMO. There are ways in some versions of D&D to mechanically represent severe specific damage by the way.

Or as Gary used to do, "if you jump off a 200 foot cliff you are dead, I don't care how many hit points you have.". He didn't think such obvious things needed to be explained.

He was wrong.