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

[pemerton]

It is a description of people who are members of Bandit and Brigand gangs and how they interact with each other.

<snip details>

Hope that clears up your confusion on how to understand the document.

It actually creates more confusion.

First, because the details that I've snipped simply reiterate the point that I had already made, that in function and basic content it is no different from the 1977 MM.

Second, because the document doesn't say how the gangs interact with each other. For instance, it doesn't say how a village tough can fall in with a bandit or brigand gang (as opposed to, say, being thrashed within an inch of their life and then being sent on their way), or how much a merchant needs to pay a brigand lieutenant to be allowed to pass without being attacked, or other fairly typical interactions that bandits and brigands might engage in.

And suppose that there are 7 (ordinary) brigands in a group. The document tells me that, among brigands, "One lieutenant will be found for every 3 to 6 brigand in the gang." So the GM decides that this gang has two lieutenants. Now, the gang gets into a fight, and 5 of its members are killed or driven off; but both lieutenants survive. So now there are 2 ordinary brigands and 2 lieutenants. How does that fit with the specification of brigand organisation? And is a GM at liberty just to decide, when presenting a new group of brigands, that it has 4 members, 2 of whom are lieutenants?

Presumably the answer is that the ratios are guidelines, or generalisations of tendency. But are they based on demographic data? An intuition as to what makes for a good challenge? Something else? What should the GM have in mind in wondering whether to depart from them, and present the 4 member, 2 ordinary + 2 lieutenant, gang of brigands? Is this gang going to break the verisimilitude of the setting? Or just be tougher than its number would suggest to a player whose read the rules for brigand lieutenants?

From the document, and your post, it's not really clear to me.

 

[pemerton]

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).

<snip>

There is a tendency for some players, sometimes entire groups, to just say "I bluff" and roll.

<snip>

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.

Here's a thread that discussed the reason for using a mechanic: Why do RPGs have rules?

That reason may not move you. But you'll see that it has nothing to do with replacing "role play" or fiction with a dice roll.

 

[pemerton]

your persistent mischaracterization of sandbox techniques as either insufficient for ensuring player agency or inherently consistent with railroading. You acknowledge the extensive clarifications offered, yet continue to present a distorted picture of what has been explained at length.

You label my explanations as "truistic," yet you consistently act as though basic concepts, such as players' freedom to engage openly with the setting and the importance of internal consistency, are controversial or insufficient. While these points might seem obvious, you've repeatedly treated them as points of contention or misunderstanding, especially in your ongoing questions about adjudication methods and the emergence of extraordinary outcomes.

I don't think what you say about "freedom to engage openly with the setting" is controversial. I do think it borders on truism. Likewise the importance of internal consistency: are there serious RPGers who don't care about this? I've not met them.

But it's not mischaracterisation for me to say that I don't regard your approaches as providing for the degree of player agency I am looking for in RPGing. It's a simple statement of the truth!

Player agency, in my sandbox campaigns, arises explicitly because players interact authentically and freely with a setting that consistently responds to their choices. Players roleplay with NPCs, set and pursue objectives, and face outcomes naturally emerging from their decisions.

Yes, I am not confused about this. I simply don't regard this as sufficient player agency for my RPGing purposes. I regard it as an account of predominantly GM-driven RPGing, because ultimately, as you describe it, it is the GM who decides how the setting responds, what outcomes are natural, etc.

As clearly outlined previously, both ordinary and extraordinary outcomes in my approach result organically from interactions, situational context, roleplaying, and impartial use of dice. The example involving the Russet Lord scenario was provided precisely to illustrate how this works in practice.

Your method of roleplaying and resolving actions through explicitly declared intentions and structured conflict-resolution mechanics is certainly a valid approach to campaign play. However, your repeated suggestion that a method relying on internal consistency, impartial adjudication, and dice-driven uncertainty inherently limits player agency or resembles railroading does not hold up.

What can I tell you? Suppose that you decide, on this occasion, not to use the dice - eg because you've decided that, on this occasion, whatever it is that my PC is doing is not sufficient to move the NPC, given your conception of them.

As best I can infer from your posts, you have not ruled out the possibility that I just describe. And for me, were I to experience that possibility in play, I would experience it as a burden on agency and a drift towards railroading.

My references to historical wargaming and the impartial referee concept highlight how well-established these ideas are within the hobby. Your dismissal of historical precedent, reducing it merely to the "teaching" of setting details rather than acknowledging its role in impartial adjudication, misrepresents how these methods historically functioned—as extensively documented by Jon Peterson and other RPG historians.

I am aware that your method draws on approaches that have a deep root in the hobby. As I've already stated, I don't agree with you as to its degree of similarity to Gygax's methods set out in his PHB. (It is closer to some of what Gygax says in his DMG, but Gygax's PHB and DMG are not entirely consistent with one another.)

Finally, it is not accurate or fair to imply that seeking accurate representation of my views equates to expecting a "courtesy of deference." On the contrary, I am seeking an honest portrayal of techniques and outcomes I have repeatedly clarified. Criticism is welcome; persistent misrepresentation is not.

The difficulty I face is that when I express my view about the degree of play agency inherent in your methods, you characterise me as misrepresenting you. That is what creates the impression that you expect deference - that I am obliged to share your standards as to what counts as sufficient player agency.

 

[pemerton]

Yeah, i think this is a good example. In a game like Blades, if you have to get past some guards, you as the player might declare a Prowl action to sneak past or a Hunt to take them out. Then you roll and success depends on the dice. Depending on the results, it may turn out you're completely successful, or that there were more guards you didn't see, or so forth. And they will vary based on position and effect.

But at no point, imo, does it feel like "if I had been more cautious things might have turned out differently". The decision you made wasn't key to determining whether or not you got past the guards--the dice roll was.

I don't know BitD all that well, but couldn't you have traded Effect for Position? In the fiction, being more cautious.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, i think this is a good example. In a game like Blades, if you have to get past some guards, you as the player might declare a Prowl action to sneak past or a Hunt to take them out. Then you roll and success depends on the dice. Depending on the results, it may turn out you're completely successful, or that there were more guards you didn't see, or so forth. And they will vary based on position and effect.

But at no point, imo, does it feel like "if I had been more cautious things might have turned out differently". The decision you made wasn't key to determining whether or not you got past the guards--the dice roll was.

To be honest, I'm not all that familiar with the specifics of Blades. But, in Ironsworn (sorry to go back to this chestnut), you could make a Secure Advantage move before you attempted to get past the guards which could very much be narrated as trying to be more cautious. Does Blades not also have some sort of move like this?

 

[Hussar]

The creatures in the Caves have no economy.

Never minding economy, they have no ecology either. What do they eat? What do they drink? There's what, about a hundred or more humanoids in the Caves - making it a fairly large town by D&D standards. With zero farming or means of gathering food. Unless the surrounding forest is absolutely loaded with food, the Caves should starve to death in about a week or so.

 

[pemerton]

Never minding economy, they have no ecology either. What do they eat? What do they drink? There's what, about a hundred or more humanoids in the Caves - making it a fairly large town by D&D standards. With zero farming or means of gathering food. Unless the surrounding forest is absolutely loaded with food, the Caves should starve to death in about a week or so.

Yeah, that's what I was meaning by saying they have no economy: no agriculture or other means of obtaining the basics of their subsistence.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

This seems a mighty harsh way of viewing other people.

Me, I generally assume innocence until guilt is proven and trustworthiness until the opposite has been shown. And so yes, I would generally trust a DM I'd never played with until-unless that trust got broken.

 

[Lanefan]

The creatures in the Caves have no economy.

As in they don't trade with each other? Or they don't use money for anything? Or...what do you mean by this?

EDIT: Saw you already answered this in a later post.

They live in the middle of a forest and one can easily extrapolate from their write-ups that the whole lot of 'em (exception noted below) are hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherer settlements of 100 people aren't/weren't uncommon in reality, so what's the problem here?

The exception are the cultists at the end. I can't remember if it's written in the module or not, but even if it's not it would seem pretty obvious they're getting their supplies (maybe under the table) from some people at the keep.

 

[pemerton]

As in they don't trade with each other? Or they don't use money for anything? Or...what do you mean by this?

They don't produce anything. Including food. So they should all be dead, of starvation. It's also utterly unclear where they get their material goods from.