D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Bedrockgames]

A "deity of alcohol"? No. The wine cult predates Dionysus. I know this is a religious thing.

But a "deity of alcohol" who would damn someone, this part is very important, AND THEIR ENTIRE FAMILY TO ETERNAL TORMENT, solely because this particular person refused one single alcoholic drink ever, for any reason? Yes, I would find that offensive, because it portrays religious people as irrational dupes, and gods as predatory monsters. Even the Greek gods, as petty and spiteful and hurtful as they could be, only very rarely punished families for the deeds of a single person (and even then, almost never as a result of just one single guilty act when the rest of the family is totally innocent; the only example I can think of that even remotely approaches that is Hera driving Herakles crazy, which resulted in him killing his first wife and children, thus necessitating the Ten-Plus-Two Labors of Herakles.)

Again, the thing that is the MASSIVE over-extension isn't a god of abstinence or alcohol. It isn't a person having strong beliefs about what they, personally, are allowed to consume. It is, very specifically, that this person refuses to be persuaded for any reason whatsoever BECAUSE they believe that if they do this mundane, not-particularly-offensive act (we're not talking something violent or sexual etc. etc.), they AND THEIR ENTIRE FAMILY will suffer eternal torment.

I cannot stress enough that it is the "I will suffer, and so will everyone I love" thing. Inflicting eternal damnation on numerous totally innocent people solely because one single person did a single act that this deity disapproves of is, patently, ridiculous.

Well clearly the god in this case is a jerk, but I can certainly see the entertainment value he would bring to a setting

 

[pemerton]

I find most groups don't play it as written, so it ends up usually just functioning as a characters making rolls instead of saying things. But if you have different experiences with this stuff, that is totally fine. I wasn't saying my experiences with skill rolls were universal. I was talking about what I experienced going from 2E to 3E, and then back to 2E and back to 3E again. It was something I noticed across multiple game groups that my level of engagement with the setting and with NPCs felt different in 3E due to those rules. But I am not saying they are bad or anything.

So, here is a typical sequence of social interactions from my TB2e game. It began when (in the fiction) the PCs were taken by their captors from the prison cell beneath the Moathouse to meet Lareth the Beautiful (in this campaign, a Half-Elf rather than a human); at the table, this involved free narration by me, probably responding to a few player questions about the environment, before narrating the opening of the meeting with Lareth:

The PCs were then taken to room 11 on the dungeon map (room 28 on the T1-T4 version of the map), where Lareth was waiting to meet them, with four soldiers guarding him. I described the gold chain on the sergeant soldier, and the bejewelled gold chain worn by Lareth, and the PCs were suitably impressed/longing for loot.

Fea-bella introduced the PCs, and then elaborated on her own introduction, as being Lareth's half-sister. Lareth was hesitant to accept this proposition, and so we went into a Convince conflict. Normally this requires equal Precedence, and Lareth, being a priest, is Precedence 3 while the adventurer PCs are Precedence 0, but I decided that in these circumstances Lareth had already deigned to debate the matter with them.

The PCs' goal was to persuade Lareth that Fea-bella is, indeed, his sister, and hence that he should offer them hospitality; Lareth wanted to persuade them to assist him in his cult's mission.

At the start of this conflict Golin decided to sweat out his fever; he recovered from Sick and his Manipulator skill dropped a rank. The PCs won the conflict, with a strong roll (with multiple sixes opened up with Fate) on the second volley, which meant I didn't get to play Lareth's third volley Feint against Fea-bella's Defend! The players nevertheless owed a significant compromise: Lareth accepted the PCs' claim about his relationship to Fea-bella, but the PCs agreed that they would go to Nulb to persuade the pirates there - who raid the river vessels of the Theocracy of the Pale - to tithe to Lareth's cult. Lareth explained the nature of his "order" (as he called it), which involved me reading bits of the background info from T1 but dropping descriptors like "followers of the worst sort" and "depredations", with Lareth instead explaining how the order had attracted the bold and the oppressed, who wanted to free the world from the domination of the Aesir and Vanir, but had been opposed by the religious authorities of the Pale, who had eventually sacked the Temple. (When asked about timelines, he said this was all 40 to 50 years ago, perhaps by coincidence around the time that Golin was born before growing up an orphan in the Forgotten Temple Complex.)

This convince conflict was the fourth turn of the grind, so the PCs were again Hungry and Thirsty. But before Lareth would feed them and let them rest a bit (= camp), he had more to say to them. First he asked Telemere about his brother (and enemy) Kalamere. Telemere politely answered his questions, and established that Lareth and Kalamere are friends, but was refraining from voicing his own true feelings of hatred toward his brother. But Lareth goaded him until he couldn't hold back (failed Manipulator vs Manipulator), making Telemere Angry.

Lareth then turned his attention to Fea-bella. The conversation established that Lareth's father was the wizard Pallando, and his mother (Fella) was an exile from Elfhome. She was exiled because of her role in the theft of the Dreamhouse post by Celedhring, the evil Elf who is now a barrow-wight beneath what was Megloss's house. Lareth explained that Celedhring was Fella's brother (and hence his and Fea-bella's uncle), and that Fella was exiled with him much as, in the ancient times, Galadriel was exiled with her cousin Feanor. "And who is your father?" asked Lareth of Fea-bella.

This caused much discussion among the players - was Lareth implying that Fea-bella was the child of an incestuous relationship between Fella and Celedhring? There was also discussion about where Fea-bella did her dreaming, before she woke, Dream-haunted, and ran off bearing a half-moon glaive. Was this not in the Elf-home Dreamhouse, but rather in Pallando's house?

I suggested that Fea-bella might try a Nature (Remembering ) test, but her player didn't want to - too much grind, and little chance of success. So I resorted to my NPC, and called for another Manipulator vs Manipulator due to Lareth's goading. This time Golin helped Lareth! The test was failed, and so (as a twist) Fea-bella could not help but cast her mind back . . . As her player put it, Fea-bella wanted to remember only happy times of her childhood, with the Elven forest and rainbows and unicorns, and I set this at (I think, from memory) Ob 2. Telemere helped with his own Remembering Nature, and Korvin used Oratory to remind Fea-bella of tales of her childhood she had told her companions. Golin also aided Fea-bella this time, with Dreams-wise.

This test was a success, and so Fea-bella was spared any horrible memories (and the truth about her father remains unknown at this point).

The sequence of events involved both an extended conflict resolution - the Convince conflict - as well as the subsequent single opposed checks, involving the two Elven PCs (Telemere and Fea-bella).

The actual play doesn't record everything that was actually said by the players for their PCs, nor by me for Lareth. Still, I hope you can see why - given that this is the sort of thing I think of when I think of social conflict resolution - you can see why I took your account to be something of a caricature.

Or to put the same point in a slightly different way: I don't doubt that your experience of skills-based social resolution is as you describe it is true - that is, fiction-free dice rolling. But I don't understand why you would assume that those of us who talk about social resolution systems in these threads have that sort of thing in mind.

 

[robertsconley]

This is conflating means and goals AFAIC. If this is the "ideal" of sandbox campaigns, then, well, to me, that means that much of the time in the "ideal" of the campaign is spent doing stuff just to get to the stuff that the players actually want to do. I believe the term for this is a "rowboat campaign" where the party just kind of wanders around aimlessly until they have achieved a sufficient amount of DM prepared information and then they actually get to do the stuff they want to do.

That's what the Initial Context is for. The group as a whole has some information; each player has their own set of information. Together, this forms the Initial Context, which allows the group to figure out what they want to do at the start of Session 1.

A general principle of my campaign is that nothing exists in a vacuum, including the players themselves. So, I work with them to figure out what their characters were doing prior to the start of the campaign.

This blog post from 2011 explains some of the process that goes into creating the Initial Context.

How to manage a sandbox campaign: The pre-game

Last post I mention three broad areas on managing sandbox campaigns. The pre-game, the bag of stuff, and world in motion. The pre-game is cr...

batintheattic.blogspot.com

IOW, limited knowledge is simply a means of stalling the players from doing whatever it is they actually want to do while they spend time uncovering information that leads them to the stuff that's of actual interest. The players don't really care if the Dungeon of Nasty Badness is in Hex 1211 or Hex 1213. They want to go to the Dungeon of Nasty Badness.

That is not how works out in my campaigns. I recommend reading this blog spot of mine

Sandpits to watch out for in your Sandbox.

Zachary talks about 'Organic Boundaries' here . I been running free-ranging campaigns for a while and learned to avoid a few of the sandpits...

batintheattic.blogspot.com

The short answer: Things don't exist in a vacuum; they cause ripples. Meaning, as the players travel, they will hear things. And some of them will be of interest, and they will elect to focus on what they just discovered.

Why are they trying to discover these things? Why are they exploring physical geography or a town's social network? These aren't goals in and of themselves. These are means to an end. The point of exploring physical geography, for example, is to find stuff that's interesting to do. The player's don't care about the town's social network in and of itself. They are discovering these things so they can then go do something they actually want to do.

So I am quoting you in reverse to build up to the final point. So there is a Initial Context that players know and can use to start adventuring. But as the campaign progresses World in Motion comes into play. Above, I talk about what happens they travel. The same things happen as time progresses in the campaign. Instead of drops and ripples that are spaced across the landscape, there are drops and ripples spaced across time. And when those ripples wash over the players, they will hear of them, and if they are interested, it becomes a basis for more adventures.

Also to be clear by the middle of the campaign many of these drops and ripples that spread through time are the result of what the players have done earlier in the campaign as a result of NPCs changing their goals and plans.

To get a better idea of how this looks, I suggest reading this campaign log by one of my players, starting at the post I linked, where they finally got out from under a civil war that erupted and started pursuing rumors about the dragon Pan Caulderax.

Majestic Wilderlands - Weekend at Bryny's - Gaming Ballistic

We picked up after a lot of time off. The last time I played, it was about five minutes and “oh, by the way, your friends managed to salvage the +2 Plate Armor,” so yay! We are apparently saddled with a young lady and her mother as a result of some action with some mercenaries. After...

gamingballistic.com

 

[mamba]

Again, please don't nickel-and-dime me here--if you have a point to make, make it.

To answer the question though, yes, the reasonableness of the obstacle plays a part...which is literally what I said in the original post. If something is so ridiculous, so utterly out-of-left-field, it indicates that even if this DM is 100% fully sincerely committed to what they consider "real-world logic" and "a realistic/verisimilitudinous/<insert your preferred term here> setting", that provides no actual limitations on what they can do and whether they'll limit perfectly reasonable, warranted actions.

but a more probable obstacle would limit the actions in a very similar way, see the cave-in vs gelatinous cube migration. I understand that you see a difference there while I do not, guess we have to leave it at that. I agree that neither should become a frequent occurrence as otherwise things do start to look a little railroad-y, but to me it is the frequency of it more than how plausible I consider the one case to be (although in the aggregate highly implausible cases raise the alarm sooner than probable ones, my threshold is still higher than one though).

Whereas to me, treating that as a prerequisite is not acceptable. Certainly, a minimum level of acceptance is required to get the ball rolling, but the GM actually needs to both (a) earn and (b) maintain player trust. (Amongst various other things the GM needs to earn and maintain; trust is just one of them.) It is precisely that "no no you absolutely have to trust me from the beginning" thing I have such a problem with

I guess we mean similar things, what I termed 'initial trust' is your 'acceptance', we agree that trust needs to be maintained or gets lost (or never established in your case)

And my problem with this maxim is that it is far, far too easily used to just...delete all meaningful response forever.

Because in many cases, these events will get lost in the sauce. That happening, say, once or twice every few months? Not really an issue, disputes happen and not getting worked up about rare incidental issues is fine. But this absolute blanket "NEVER EVER dispute me during session or you're outta here" attitude shuts down criticism and review

I said nothing about 'or you are out of here', that is certainly not how I would handle it. I would ask to postpone it until after the session unless it is very important that the issue is addressed right away - but it then better be important too, not because I will kick you out if it isn't, but because it could and should have waited otherwise

It's literally just that "outside of session" time is, in 99.99% of my experience, almost totally devoid of any productive activity between participants, GM or player alike.

I would assume at a minimum an email exchange should be possible, if that has not worked in the past then you do not really have a choice but to bring it up during the session

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To me, that's what respect is.

Trust is present until-unless that trust is violated.

Trust and respect are not the same.

Respect must also be earned. Respect takes much longer to earn than basic trust, because you have to meet a much higher bar. That is, trust requires shows of trustworthiness. (Hence why, as I said, initial allowance is necessary--you must give someone the opportunity to show trustworthiness in order to establish basic trust. Higher degrees of trust are established by longer sustained periods of trustworthiness.) Earning respect requires shows of excellence in one form or another, sustained over a long enough period to be clearly the result of character, effort, skill, or knowledge, not just a random fluke or run of good fortune.

Because, by your standard, this means you should 100% perfectly trust anything any GM ever does no matter what, even if you've never met them before and know literally nothing at all about them except the campaign description they wrote. I'm pretty sure that you would not instantly and infinitely trust such a person, even "infinitely" within the bounds of running a campaign.

Nobody--nobody--inherently deserves trust. Not even a GM offering to run a game.

Now, this doesn't mean people should start setting traps--which they will usually call "tests"--to try to force someone to prove their trustworthiness. That is a recipe for utter failure on both ends, and just makes the trap-setter/test-giver paranoid and incapable of forming meaningful connections with others. But it does mean that nobody, not even a GM offering to run a game for others, can just blithely act like the players automatically trust everything they do all the time forever--which is precisely what comes from the presumption that the GM is and must be trusted.

Trust is earned. Not by passing tests, but by demonstrating trustworthiness. Violating that trust means it's lost--often permanently, and even when it can be regained, it is usually a painfully slow process.

And putting all (generic) your information and decisions in a black box and then telling me "just trust me, bro!" isn't the way to earn trust. It is, in fact, one of the best ways to make me wonder if I should have trusted (generic) you in the first place.

 

[mamba]

And the examples the person who said that gave were simply there to show, with I felt pretty reasonable accuracy, that it's actually extremely rare for someone to have a position that they would absolutely never, under any circumstance, deviate from, particularly with something as (relatively) minor as consuming a single alcoholic drink.

I agree, my interpretation of 'he does not drink alcohol' was more along the lines of, you cannot sweet-talk him into drinking alcohol, not you can threaten to kill his family and he still won't

 

[Bedrockgames]

So, here is a typical sequence of social interactions from my TB2e game. It began when (in the fiction) the PCs were taken by their captors from the prison cell beneath the Moathouse to meet Lareth the Beautiful (in this campaign, a Half-Elf rather than a human); at the table, this involved free narration by me, probably responding to a few player questions about the environment, before narrating the opening of the meeting with Lareth:
The sequence of events involved both an extended conflict resolution - the Convince conflict - as well as the subsequent single opposed checks, involving the two Elven PCs (Telemere and Fea-bella).

The actual play doesn't record everything that was actually said by the players for their PCs, nor by me for Lareth. Still, I hope you can see why - given that this is the sort of thing I think of when I think of social conflict resolution - you can see why I took your account to be something of a caricature.

I don't think there is anything wrong with this system, I still think my point is I get more immersed in freeform RP around these kinds of things (and I can see you had RP here, I just mean that is the only thing I want to be a consideration). But like I said, I still use social rules because most people seem to want them. The only time I am a stickler for this these days is when I play Ravenloft. I only do 2E now for that, and it is because I find it really impacts mood and feel for me.

Or to put the same point in a slightly different way: I don't doubt that your experience of skills-based social resolution is as you describe it is true - that is, fiction-free dice rolling. But I don't understand why you would assume that those of us who talk about social resolution systems in these threads have that sort of thing in mind.

I didn't assume that. Rolling came up in the conversation with @hawkeyefan. You've pointed out to me many times you use systems that don't do this. But the focus at the moment of that discussion for me was contrasting skill rolls and free form RP. Keep in mind, I am not saying you don't have RP with skill based resolution either. My point was it trips me up. There is a tendency for some players, sometimes entire groups, to just say "I bluff" and roll. I understand abundantly that isn't how the mechanic works, as I have pointed this out to people during games. But it is a bigger issue than role-play being sidestepped, to me it feels like even when it is happening, it undermines it. And it is basically because I don't see the need for a mechanic here. I can say my thing in character, the GM can respond to it. I don't mind light systems. Reaction rolls don't really bother me for example, and I like social systems that inform RP (like the Etiquette roll in 2E).

Keep in mind too, this was deep into a long discussion on sandbox and agency, and we hit on this one example of a guard who can't be bribed. I even said, not every sandbox would eschew social mechanics, but I felt it was generally widely accepted in sandboxes that the GM ought to have authority over NPC personality traits (including strong ones that could even reach a level of "can't be bribed", "Won't cheat on wife"). And so the question was more about whether any procedure or mechanic ought to be able to shift that or not. But we were just barely keeping up with each other because the discussion was moving so fast. So I wasn't intentionally trying to exclude all the other ways this could be handled. I was trying to focus on two very clear contrasting approaches that each came up

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I guess we mean similar things, what I termed 'initial trust' is your 'acceptance', we agree that trust needs to be maintained or gets lost (or never established in your case)

For me, the difference is that acceptance/allowance/etc. (I've used more than one term in the thread, my apologies!) has an expiration date, while trust does not. That is, acceptance/allowance is there to get the ball rolling, to provide that initial space so that actual trust can be established. If it isn't established within some reasonable period of time, the acceptance/allowance dries up, and you move on with your life rather than continuing this relationship, whatever that relationship might be (this applies to anything, not just the player/GM relationship.)

Further, acceptance/allowance/etc. can't really be "violated" per se, since it's a gift, not something earned. Trust absolutely can be violated, and once it has been, it's probably been lost forever. Certainly with trust within the TTRPG space, once it's been lost there's very little reason to bother trying to rebuild it; the amount of time it would take and the amount of distrustful suspicions in the meantime would likely poison any attempted gaming. Even when it isn't lost forever, rebuilding trust takes dramatically longer than building it the first time.

I said nothing about 'or you are out of here', that is certainly not how I would handle it. I would ask to postpone it until after the session unless it is very important that the issue is addressed right away - but it then better be important too, not because I will kick you out if it isn't, but because it could and should have waited otherwise

Others certainly have, and the authoritative air is certainly thick whenever this kind of stuff comes up. "My way or the highway"-ism is rampant among folks who talk about "trust the GM" etc.

I certainly agree that making mountains out of molehills is a problem, and if a player does that too often, we're going to need to have a talk.

I would assume at a minimum an email exchange should be possible, if that has not worked in the past then you do not really have a choice but to bring it up during the session

Both as a player and a GM, I fully agree these things are possible.

The problem is, that possibility almost never actually manifests. With nearly every player I've worked with, I as GM have had to be the one pushing things forward on "off" days. With nearly every GM I've worked with, their prep time and personal lives (entirely justifiably!) take up most of their attention, and even reasonable prompting at regular intervals often does not produce results...until a session finally comes around anyway.

And, again, this is even with GMs (and players!) that I have genuinely, unreservedly liked and been happy to work with. This isn't bad GMs. It isn't even mediocre GMs. It's the vast majority of GMs, regardless of skill level or intentions, in my experience.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My point was it trips me up.

As with far, far too many things, I find that the issue isn't the approach itself. It is the unfamiliarity of the approach.

You are used to doing all of these things exclusively through freeform. So anything that isn't freeform automatically feels weird, because it is unfamiliar.

The problem is the unfamiliarity, not the approach itself. And that, that exact thing, "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it"...

is the exhausting conservatism of D&D fans, per the thread topic.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That doesn't sound like a TTRPG mechanics problem. If your level of disagreement or lack of commonplace with another person is that profound, I'm not sure playing games with them should be your biggest concern.

Except that well-constructed mechanics are specifically a thing IN ORDER TO get people on the same page.

Like...that's one of the most important functions of rules. To make sure everyone is on the same page.

It's why we have many, precise and specific, rules for combat. One of the places where it would be very easily for people to not be on the same page.