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

[Swarmkeeper]

II'm fine with their being stuck. I'm not a fan of "fail forward", because when taken to any length at all it means that though there might be some complications, at the root of it the PCs always get what they want (in this case, to get over the wall). To me fail means fail, period: you don't get what you want...and there might be complications on top of that.

Fail forward, or success with a setback, is tool like any other. Not every situation calls for a die roll. Not every situation is a binary pass fail. And not every situation is appropriate for fail forward. So, yeah, the characters don't always get what they want just because a DM chooses fail forward as an adjudication tool from time to time.

 

[Lanefan]

This is probably why I tend to focus so much on the system in these matters. The system is impartial.

Ideally, yes. Baked-in imbalances (large scale) and-or loopholes-exploits-rules errors (small scale) can, however, butcher this ideal.

Knowing that means I can push the characters. I can test them. I can make things tough for them. And I can enjoy their victories, and be sad at their defeats.

One can still be impartial during the testing time while being happy or sad with them after the fact.

Isn't that the opposite of impartiality? You changed things based on the player's desire.

It is, and I think that was the point. Not how I'd have done it, but if it works for that table all is good..

I don't think that changing things is being impartial. I think impartiality would have dictated that you not change things based on the player's desire. That this is how things are, and that's the way they will remain, regardless.

Agreed.

 

[The Firebird]

So games like Burning Wheel and Apocalypse Keys are not character centric storytelling. We're not doing things to inject drama. We're addressing the premise of the characters. There's no narrative to serve. We're playing to find out who these characters are under pressure, but it's not about drama or what makes for a satisfying narrative. It's not about character arcs. It's about following them on their journey.

Now what my home group does in our L5R, Vampire and Final Fantasy games is character centered storytelling. There is a narrative we are building together. A sense of arcs we're building to, weaving things together.

These are very very different things. The nuances of these things matter a lot to people like me. These things are being casually conflated by people in this thread.

I can understand the frustration here. Maybe it is obvious, but I think it's worth saying that a lot of the little phrases used in the discussion are jargon. I guess they say something specific if you've encountered them, but what they say literally is open to a much wider array of interpretations.

I mean terms like "play to find out what happens", "player driven", "addressing the premise of the characters", "character centered storytelling", or "hold on lightly", just to pick some from the thread.

I'm not even sure if all of those have a precise technical meaning. I've encountered some but not others.

I imagine this contributes somewhat to the difficulty of communication.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

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.

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.

Except that a whole lot of people 1) enjoy discovering things and uncovering information, and 2) enjoy setting their own goals based on a sandbox situation.

I've played in groups who sat down and looked at a map, then said things like, "The Forest of Bone Garden" sounds interesting, let's go and see what's there." We had a blast.

 

[Maxperson]

For example, if your "living world" is so important that you are constantly advancing various events into the world as time moves forward, and none of those events are initiated by the players, at some point, it starts looking a lot more like a linear campaign. After all, when the ravening hordes of zombies come to town, there aren't a lot of choices. And it's not like the players created that horde. It's not like the players initiated this event. It's 100% DM driven.

This is incredibly wrong. Stuff happens, but it's not forced on you. A horde is coming, leave town. Hide. Fight it. Or hear about it decimating a town 100 miles away. Just because it's happening does not mean it's happening right were you are at, or that you have to interact with it in any way.

Maybe you care that the duke's daughter is getting married because time has advanced in the game. Maybe you don't. Maybe you care that a massive hurricane struck the coast and flooded four cities and will go there to help. Maybe you won't. Maybe you happened to be there through pure happenstance.

A linear adventure has only forward and back, and a living world is so far from that it's not even funny. At no point does it ever look at all like a linear campaign.

 

[Maxperson]

Yet multiple posters in this thread have posited White Plume Mountain as consistent with sandboxing. Now maybe @The Firebird was just reaching for an easy example; but @Lanefan didn't seem to be. And Lanefan has told us that he has used Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth in a game that is described as a sandbox.

Almost nothing can be less realistic than either of those modules!

You seem to be conflating sandbox with realism. You can have very realistic sandbox games, and very unrealistic sandbox games. Sandbox is just a style of play and realism can and does vary greatly from one sandbox to the next.

 

[bloodtide]

Which is perfectly fine. But, it is difficult, IMO, to reconcile the idea of total player freedom and DM generated events.

The easy way to do it is have the player-dm never do or generate anything unless a player tells them too. And as players don't care about such things even if a zombie horde was to get close to a city, a player can just stamp their feet and say "no, player-dm make it go away". And the player-dm will bow and say "yes, player" and do so.

 

[Maxperson]

That doesn't answer the question though. Like this is a complete and total dodge of actually answering the question.

"Sometimes those things are valuable" does not answer the question of WHY are those things valuable.

It's not really a dodge. Diamonds are common as spit, but we value them greatly. Cryptocurrency doesn't exist, yet Bitcoin is sitting at $96,786.54 a piece right now.

Why are they valuable? Because people value those things. It's really not any more complicated than that. The same goes for playstyles.

 

[Maxperson]

Totally unsatisfactory.

No one--not even the GM--deserves trust. It must be earned. That's what trust is.

I agree that allowance of various things is required to get the game started. But that is a temporary thing; it is permitting the stage to be set so that trust may be earned. It is not carte blanche to do whatever, whenever, with a mere "don't you trust me?" any time something dubious comes up.

I don't agree with that. In the real world, sure. When it comes to RPGs, trust should be extended until the DM does something to show he doesn't deserve it. The game runs on trust. Distrust spoils the game and makes the game unfun for just about everyone.

 

[Maxperson]

Do you deny, then, that the near-absolute levels of power within the game permit the D&D-alike DM to do harm, even by accident, even while fully and absolutely intending to do the right thing for the right reasons?

In my opinion, the bar to having harm done to you is set higher than having a bad experience in a session of D&D. There are exceptions as some bad experiences can be associated with similar very traumatic events the player experienced in the real world, but by and large no harm is done by bad DMs.