D&D General Alternate thought - rule of cool is bad for gaming

[pemerton]

PbtA games take a very different approach than D&D does but it still ultimately comes down to automatic resolution, randomized resolution or using some resources.

This is not true of AW. It does not "ultimately come down to" what you say it comes down to.

Here is a very brief summary of the AW action resolution rules. Fully spelled out, the rules take up probably about 10 pages, maybe 20.

There are rules that establish who gets to say what happens next, and what the parameters are for what they say.

In general, the GM gets to say what happens next, and what they might say is established by the list of GM moves, and in general it is to be a soft move.

If the GM has already made a soft move and no player declares an action that might stop the trajectory of events coming home, then the GM is entitled to make as hard and direct a move as they like.

And as an exception to the general rule, if a player declares an action for their PC that triggers a player move, than that move is resolved. On a 6- result, the GM can make as hard and direct a move as they like. On a 7+, the rules for the player move establish what happens next, or who gets to say what happens next and within what parameters.

 

[Oofta]

This is not true of AW. It does not "ultimately come down to" what you say it comes down to.

Here is a very brief summary of the AW action resolution rules. Fully spelled out, the rules take up probably about 10 pages, maybe 20.

True to your name, you're being pedantic when I'm talking generalities. All games have rules and goals of play.

Call them moves, call them actions, call them kerfluggles, I don't care. One of the people at the table does something and there are rules about what the result is. Results can take many forms including a random factor like rolling a 7+.

Is the flow and reactions the same as D&D or any other D20 game? No. Of course not. But there has never been a TTRPG that explicitly tells you the result of everything every person at the table does or could possibly do. They give exact description at times (if you meet or exceed AC you do X damage in D&D). Other times it's guidance or something else.

This all started because you claimed the game has rules for everything back in post 305. It can't. At least not defined rules to any significant level of granularity. I watched some PbtA intro to DW streams a while back, the game just has a different approach.

It's systems aren't inherently better, it doesn't have any more answers than D&D, it just takes a different approach.

 

[Umbran]

Kind of a weird example. Isn't half the point of Ravenloft being to break people (the other half being Ironic Hell)?

Feels like a butterfly chasing pacifist being thrust into a world if infinite sadness and violence would be what some people consider a good RP opportunity.

As a practical matter, some choices are self-limiting. A pacifist in a world of infinite violence will be a good RP opportunity, but only until the violence catches up with them.

 

[Umbran]

Something here doesn't quite square:

OK, sounds great so far: AW has a rule for everything. Straightforward, simple, no questions - declare any action, the rules can handle it.

However...

...if it indeed has a rule for everything then in theory it should be able to reasonably-equally-well output any sort of focus and-or play experience its particpants desire, yet you state it instead produces "a certain sort of focus and play experience".

Which tells me that while AW may well have rules that fully cover all the things its designers want them to cover in order to produce that play experience, they're still - just like any other RPG rule-set - only covering a subset of "everything".

Don't confuse "the rules can cover everything" with "anything you choose is equally likely to be successful, or a good idea in the setting".

 

[Remathilis]

Kind of a weird example. Isn't half the point of Ravenloft being to break people (the other half being Ironic Hell)?

Feels like a butterfly chasing pacifist being thrust into a world if infinite sadness and violence would be what some people consider a good RP opportunity. Moreso than a preexisting grey-morality sad boy who's just going to go with it and might make a good Dark Power themself.

Ravenloft is Gothic horror and works best with characters designed with that sensibilities. If your character's intention was to be an innocent who is affected by the misery around them, that's great. Lots of gothic protags start out naive and grow as the horror influences (sometimes for the better, others the worst) but what I'm discussing is something more akin to a anime Magic Girl who thinks the world is sparkles and rainbows and clashes tonally with the dread and fear horror is supposed to provide. It might be funny for a minute, but such tone clashing often ruins the mood for everyone because it drains the tension out of the scenes. It's not a bad character, but it's a bad character for that particular game.

Though to be fair, there are plenty of other examples I probably could have used. A stock medieval knight in a swashbuckling pirate game, an evil scheming thief in a band of noble heroes, or a Viking berserker in Greek myth. That act of going against the nature of the game being run. That is a far more unforgivable sin to me than being a dragon man or a chaos magic user.

 

[Maxperson]

5e asserts that it is based on "rulings not rules". But it has a uniform system for stats, and for skills. There is a system of backgrounds and feats (I gather the former are getting merged into the latter?). The classes are integrated, total packages. If I want to know how my fighter can wrongfoot an opponent, I don't look for a ruling - I look at the Battlemaster sub-class rules.

I don't see anything that resembles the "just make up a new subsystem" approach of classic D&D, or "just write up a new class" that gave us the thief, the ranger, the illusionist, the bard, etc back in the early days.

So there is not a uniform system for stats. There are multiple ways given to choose stats or the DM can make up his own like I did. The DMG offers at least two other ways to do skills, and the PHB offers up one alternative. Not so uniform. Feats are optional or not, and some folks like me give a 1st level feat for free. House rules are a part of the game. If I want the base fighter class to be able to "wrongfoot" an opponent, it can.

5e is every bit as kitbashable as 1e was. 5e just gives DMs a base to start off with on many things 1e didn't.

 

[Maxperson]

Don't confuse "the rules can cover everything" with "anything you choose is equally likely to be successful, or a good idea in the setting".

@pemerton said that the AW rules focus resolutions into three categories, which means that those rules don't cover action focusing into other categories than those three. They may have a rule that covers every action, but they don't have a rule for everything.

If there are 50 possible resolutions for an action, but the rule only covers 3 of them, even though the rule technically does cover that action, there still is no rule for the other 47 resolutions.

 

[tetrasodium]

I'd not want to be at a d&d table where a player decided to spring a burden like their play acting"butterfly chasing pacifist" failure of a PC onto everyone else's character who now need to carry the weight not being carried by said pacifist or become drafted into the role of life coach/therapist just to convince a problematic character concept to grow to a point that should have been accounted for during chargen and ready at the start of the first session.

As much as the player introducing it might try to claim that they aren't trying to force anyone else to play their characters as life support for the butterfly chasing pacifist concept that kind of claim gets severely undercut by the social contract. Unfortunately for the rest of the group it's rarely possible for the group to say "bob, we dub your character an NPC... specifically a boring one that offers us nothing.. make a new one while we leave it forgotten in town & go off to adventure". It doesn't really matter if that player "considers it a good RP opportunity" unless the player who wanted to enjoy that "good RP opportunity" spoke with the rest of that table and the table agreed to make characters dedicated to being life support for their "good RP opportunity".

 

[Oofta]

So there is not a uniform system for stats. There are multiple ways given to choose stats or the DM can make up his own like I did. The DMG offers at least two other ways to do skills, and the PHB offers up one alternative. Not so uniform. Feats are optional or not, and some folks like me give a 1st level feat for free. House rules are a part of the game. If I want the base fighter class to be able to "wrongfoot" an opponent, it can.

5e is every bit as kitbashable as 1e was. 5e just gives DMs a base to start off with on many things 1e didn't.

Back in 1E it was more "how do I interpret this" and "this isn't marked as optional, but we're never going to use it." Along with a healthy dose of "what the heck are they talking about?" To me, other than 4E, and to a lesser extend 3E, I think most versions of D&D have been pretty open to customization and homebrew. It really does show that with 5E they went back to the older TSR versions of the game to make some fundamental design direction.

 

[Umbran]

@pemerton said that the AW rules focus resolutions into three categories, which means that those rules don't cover action focusing into other categories than those three. They may have a rule that covers every action, but they don't have a rule for everything.

If, within the system, you can resolve every valid action declaration, you have a rule for everything.

If there are 50 possible resolutions for an action, but the rule only covers 3 of them, even though the rule technically does cover that action, there still is no rule for the other 47 resolutions.

Hold on a second. Whether there is a rule for an action is separate from saying there is a rule that will produce a particular result.

Say I'm playing Leverage: The RPG. The setting of this game is pretty much our own, with some exceptional information technology. Characters in this system cannot lift multiple tons.

Consider a player then stating a goal and approach as, "I want to make this guy end up smashing through several buildings like in a superhero movie, and I do it by punching him."

The goal is not attainable within the setting or ruleset - it is well outside the genre expectations. But, the system has a way to handle punching the target as hard as you can.

How do you view that, in terms of having rules for actions?