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

[AlViking]

For me, it's not about trust. Especially since I don't want that heightened level of authority when I am DMing.

It's because I feel play flows the best when the player and DM are both heavily involved, and when narrative control and the driving of play volleys back and forth between participants. There's no need for refs or judgements, we all just play and leave the "refereeing" to the ruleset.

Which is why I think all of this really just boils down to personal preferences that we attach measurements and labels to. When I play a character I want the only interactions with the world around me to be what my character says and does. It's not better or worse than any other preference, it's just what I want.

 

[The Firebird]

For me, it's not about trust. Especially since I don't want that heightened level of authority when I am DMing.

It's because I feel play flows the best when the player and DM are both heavily involved, and when narrative control and the driving of play volleys back and forth between participants. There's no need for refs or judgements, we all just play and leave the "refereeing" to the ruleset.

Cool. Thats a good way of putting it. I prefer the judgements, but to each their own.

 

[Maxperson]

Of course not. But I also don't think that "objectivity in worldbuilding" is really a worthwhile goal for TTRPG play.

I still don't know what that even means or why it matters. There is no objectivity in world building.

As the DM, I want this here, that over there, this would be cool, and so on. It's subjective. However, once I've placed those things, they are objective parts of the world that has been built. They are now game facts for the players.

 

[CellarHeroes]

Ugh...the OP is right...this is exhausting.

I think it all boils down to, regardless of what is or isn't going on behind the scenes...
Do your players think they're playing in a sandbox?
Are they having fun?
Any decent GM with experience on both sides of the screen can pull this off.

 

[Gimby]

I've give my opinion on this before but if you're making decisions based on established fiction then by definition you aren't railroading.

My definition of railroading.

Railroading = ignoring the established fiction to get to a story outcome you want

I'm not sure that follows, all it needs is for the railroading to be being done by an entity in the game world. A high level caster placing a compulsion on a character party (Geas is the typical example) is a fairly classic railroading technique and one that may align entirely with established fiction - it might seem arbitrary to the players but there's nothing stopping you establishing fiction whereby it makes sense for this to happen. Equally many railroading techniques can be pre-established - there are powerful monsters that will eat you if you leave the road and the town behind you has been destroyed by a rampaging horde, forcing you down a single path - entirely possible to establish this in the fiction.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Sure, if you don’t want a railroad adventure, then tell your DM - it’s their job to tailor the game to suit the players.

This. That is the thing. It is very much about that kind of communication with the GM. Players having feee reign to explore where they want in a campaign is just not a railroad

I think the Adventure Path being a dominant element of play to this day says a lot about this. I don't think it's anywhere near as rare as you think.



As I said, my tastes are not contrary to the kind of game you're describing. My recent Mothership campaign was, as far as I can tell, exactly like what you describe. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The players were free to kind of romp around in the playground I made for them. The world was pretty much indifferent to who the characters were.

Why I describe it as GM driven is because I designed the setting in its entirety (though I did use a published module called A Pound of Flesh). The players could choose where they wanted to go. At the start of play, we determined that their ship had been damaged, and they needed to get to a port quickly. I gave them three different locations to choose from, and told them some bits about each location. They chose the space station, and that then determined what was going to be available to them... based on what I had prepared and would make available to them.

I'm not saying that such a game is linear. I'm not saying such a game is a railroad. I am saying that the GM is clearly the primary driver of play. Yes, the players choose where to do... the characters have autonomy... they have a say. But what they have a say about is pretty much which of the GM's prep they interact with. The events of play are mostly based on the GM's prep. That's why I'd call it GM-driven.

I don't mean GM-driven to be in any way a negative.



Well, I posted an example of what I'd consider player-driven play in a campaign of Blades in the Dark that my group just started. Here it is below. I think the way the Score came together is sufficiently different from the GM preparing things ahead of play.

What you are describing does not sound player driven to me. It sounds more like player generated content. And I am not saying that is bad or less of a sandbox. This looks very workable. But you are talking about something completely different from what Rob and others are deducting when they say their games are player driven, not GM driven. And I think you are glossing over crucial aspects of how we ply. Players arent just picking locations and there for the ride. They are driving the action and direction by their choices, by their actions and declarations, through Q&A etc. yes the GM is managing setting details creating setting content. But I do not at all think that means the campaign is GM driven. Like I said, something where the GM has a story to tell, that would be more GM driven. But this style is bass more on the GM being reactive to players and on the chemistry that unfolds as players pursue their goals and this bones into conflict or harmony with NPC goals

Clearly there is a real distinction here around Gm and player authority. We all agree on that. That is a substantial difference. What we disagree on is what that means in terms of agency and who is driving play.

 

[hawkeyefan]

This gets back to the issue of trust. I don't mind them having this authority if I know they aren't going to abuse it. Indeed, the authority remaining with the GM can result in more satisfying play when they exercise it properly.

Sure. Though I don't think it's necessarily about trust, and it's frustrating that it always comes back to this.

For me, it's largely about lowering the burden on the GM. I think the more they have to create and the more they create, the greater the burden, and the more likely that mistakes are made, or that judgment isn't always as strong as it could be. I say this more as a GM than as a player... though based on many comments in this thread, I see GMing mistakes as being far more common and more forgivable than many other folks.

I'm not worried about bad faith GMing. I just don't think it takes bad faith for GMing to be less than ideal.

I apologize it came off as condescending. That was not my intent.

Fair enough! My apologies for assuming the worst interpretation of that!

I was thinking of the fact that some people had talked about how GMs, in their experience, never gave enough information in fixed world games, so they always felt their choices weren't informed. That was the same experience I had that turned me onto narrative games. Then @pemerton responded to my example of the players choosing between travel to the Glacier of the Worm or Forest of Tears by assuming the only information the players had was 'cold vs forest'.

That suggested to me that many people were experiencing something similar--their fixed world GMs were withholding information and made them feel they were not making meaningful choices. In that context, a lot of the complaints sounded more like complaints about this GMing failure than the specific playstyle.

I think this is largely true, and I think it's a by-product of old school advice that may not always be best, even for that kind of play, and certainly not for more modern versions of play. There can be an inherent impulse to withhold information from the players. After all, looking at the earliest D&D games, it was all about managing resources to learn information to then make the best decision. The GM would therefore naturally withhold information until the players made the correct move (whether as a spell, or some race or class ability, or just as a description of what the character does, i.e. "I look on the underside of the fireplace mantle", etc.).

My earliest exposure to D&D was very much this style of play. Yet my formative time as a GM came more in the 2e era, when I met friends who were into gaming and we formed the group that largely is still the one I game with to this day. So my earliest GMing involved two approaches to play that didn't really gel. I think this is something that still holds sway in the hobby. GMs have secrets, and they don't want to reveal them until the time is right... whether that's when the player makes the right move to trigger the sharing of the secret, or if it's the dramatically appropriate time to do so.

So that impulse is one I recall and had to actively work to deny. I still get it from time to time today. I recognize it in a lot of comments here on ENW, I see it in a lot of RPG products. I see a lot of justifications for it (i.e. "but the characters might not know that", etc.). I think when it comes to the information shared, we should err on the side of giving players too much information... better for play to proceed than for things to grind to a halt.

My most recent experience with this type of play was when running Tomb of Annihilation in 5e. Play was great all through the kind of sandbox type of set up of the Chult hexcrawl. Then once the PCs reached the actual dungeon, play ground to a halt as they started turtling and pixel-bitching about every single thing they tried to do.

if the GM exercises it without consideration of the players, yes

Sure... and many folks will literally say that it is preferrable for the GM to do so. That otherwise, the "world revolves around the PCs, and that's not realistic" or what have you.

making these decisions was a choice

Sure, but not necessarily with the goal of shutting the players down. Looking back on my earliest forays into GMing, I was never trying to thwart the players in any way. I was trying to create an engaging game. I was at times misguided in how to do so.

 

[Faolyn]

Well, one actual problem is that people keep telling me what I think, rather than reading what I post, and/or asking me what I think.

Where have I posted that there is only one way to play D&D? I mean, I've posted in this very thread about at least three different approaches: classic Gygaxian dungon-crawling; DL/AP-esque "storytelling" play; and 4e scene-framed play.

Have you actively said there's only one way to play D&D? No, but I can read what you write. "the priorities can pertain to matters beyond adventuring and looting and solving problems and mysteries, and so the stakes of situations can be very personal, or low stakes from the point of view of other people in the setting. For instance, a scene in which one character tries to persuade another to mend his dented armour can have as much heft in play a a scene in which the two characters fight for their lives against some Orcs."

So what, exactly, does this mean? Because it certainly sounds like you're saying "D&D primarily focuses on adventuring, looting, solving problems, and mysteries, and in contrast, BW doesn't and (therefore) has more personal stakes." Did you actually mean to say "both D&D and BW can focus on low stakes play; I just prefer using BW to do so"?

I mean, we've had deeply personal scenes in the D&D games I've been in all the time. Does that count?

Yes, I'm aware that some people use D&D PCs and (some parts of the) D&D rules to support this sort of play.

Well, then you're wrong about the violence. In the campaign where I play Thurgon - a knight of a holy military order - there have been (from memory) two fights. Thurgon fought some Orcs; and he fought a demon.

So there's chunks of violence in the game. Your particular game doesn't have a lot of it.

I found the ToC for the full Burning Wheel book. It has whole chapters on combat, weapon, and armor, dealing with injuries, modifiers for combat--including called shots! D&D doesn't have called shots! I own games that have minimal combat sections or that outright say "no combat" because the game is actually about something else. So to me, including such detailed rules for combat indicates that combat is expected to happen at least sometimes, and that there's room for it to happen a lot.

Or, like in the D&D game I'm in and the Level Up game I'm running, not very often--that game's GM and I both agree that if something is going to attack the players, and more importantly might die in the process, it needs to have a darn good reason to do so.

As I think I posted, one of the more intense moments was his attempt to persuade Aramina - his travelling companion - to mend his armour. And of course his reunions with his brother Rufus and mother Xanthippe, about which I have posted in this thread.

Sure. And we've had intense moments where PCs have helped one another learn to accept magical healing when they had previously been against it, get over phobias, deal with family issues, and other such things.

Things like this don't require a particular system. They require that the players be interested in this sort of roleplay.

Burning Wheel is about conflict - rising action, climax, resolution - not particularly about violence.

No. I mean things like this guard can't be bribed or there are no secret entrances into this building or the attack on the town will happen on <insert date here>. The sorts of things that are written in GM's notes.

Maybe, maybe not. If I actually create a guard NPC--give them a name, a backstory, beliefs, goals, etc.--I may decide that they can't be bribed, because there are reasons in their backstory. For some nameless NPC? Nah. That's decided on the fly, shaped heavily on how the PCs act to them. I am not going to write down that none of the guards can be bribed, and in my experience, this way is fairly common.

I'm sure some D&D DMs do, as do the GMs of other games. And there are probably BW Gms that do so as well. Even if they don't write it down ahead of time, it may be an idea that comes naturally to them over the course of describing the scene.

This is anathema to Burning Wheel. You seem to be thinking of Fate, or similar RPGs that allow players to engage in a high degree of curation of character arcs.

Or PbtA, or any of the other zillions of games out there that do this, as this method seems to be far more popular these days than simple pass/fail systems. Yes, that is what I had been expecting, since I consider it to be a better way of handling checks than a binary pass/fail, and was quite surprised to find out that wasn't the case in BW.

See how, in your second paragraph, you say "some GMs have players roll . . ." That's already a difference from BW.

And there is nothing in any 5e D&D rulebook I'm aware of that identifies player-determined stakes as the trigger for rendering something uncertain. The rules in D&D Beyond, that I already quoted upthread, treat uncertainty as an input into the question of whether or not to roll, not an output of that decision (which must therefore be made on other grounds):

True. But D&D is trying to to let their players have choices in how they run the game. Some games do that. Other games do not. There's nothing wrong with any of these approach, and they all can be used in pretty much any type of game. All it requires is that the players work together.

The DM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results.​

I can't say anything about 5.24. I told you what the 5.14 DMG says: "Dice are neutral arbiters. They can determine the outcome of an action without assigning any motivation to the DM and without playing favorites. The extent to which you use them is entirely up to you."

D&D, of course, is trying to be all things to all people. Some GMs want checks made for everything. Others want the players to RP out. And some games, apparently including BW, don't allow that choice by RAW; the when and how often a roll is called for is spelled out in the rules.

This is the exact opposite of Burning Wheel, not "literally how [it] works".

The decision to call for a Steel test is not arbitrary. The rules state when the GM may call for a Steel test, including the starting point of "say 'yes' or roll the dice".

OK, when do the rules allow it? Is the GM allowed to call for a Steel test if a player wants to kill someone?

"Then her player, wearing the GM hat, insisted that I make a Steel check to commit cold-blooded murder."

In this case, that you quoted, one player, the person play Alicia, who was "wearing the GM hat," told another player, the person playing Aedhros, how to play their character. And this was mechanically supported.

In D&D--and indeed, in every other game I've played in or run, regardless of system--it would be perfectly OK for Alicia to say "whoa, Aedhros, would your character really just go straight in for cold-blooded murder like that? that doesn't seem like him.." Or "Aedhros, wouldn't your character realize it would be better to leave this one alive?" But to then "insist" on a check that would stop him--and not because of any supernatural reasons or sacred but not-spiritually binding vows or anything like that, but because player 1 decided, what, that's not what player 2's character would do? I don't mean Alicia trying to stop him from killing the guy using in-character means (such as hoping to mind control him before he could strike the blow). I mean using out-of-character mechanics to force her preferences onto another PC.

I don't like that.

(I'm going to assume that your table is perfectly fine with the PvP in the example, but unless Aedhros' player gave OOC consent, it would be a no-go at my table.)

OK? I'm not sure what this tells me about Burning Wheel, other than that you haven't arrived at a similar set of procedures in your play of other RPGs.

It's not supposed to tell you anything other than how I play.

I have to say, though, that "you haven't arrived at a similar set" bit? Like obviously I'll eventually come around to your way of thinking.

But actually, yes. I have had the occasional player try to do some nasty things in games I run. Since those actions weren't harming another PC without their player's consent, I allowed it. I'm not going to tell them that's not how their character would act or have them make a check to see if they can do it. That would be railroading.

I guess its because I've been familiar with player-facing morale checks in Classic Traveller (1977) since I first read the game in the late 1970s that I don't find Steel checks particularly shocking as a mechanics.

Here an example, in play, of a Steel test:
The framework for Steel tests establishes a premise for the game: violence and murder are not undemanding things for a person to engage in or witness.

In the same way that, in classic versions of D&D, dungeon doors are not trivial to go through, requiring a roll to open doors; so, in BW, murderous violence is not trivial to go through - the GM can call for a Steel test to see if the character hesitates.

I can't believe you think requiring a test of physical strength as being the same thing as forcing a player to play their PC in a specific way because the game has decided that violence should be shocking.

 

[mamba]

If a 1st level party wants to seek out a dragon’s lair, I wouldn’t stand in their way.

ok, but what is the likelihood of that happening… they can still do that even if the DM introduced the lair, the assumption simply was that they would not because they know they stand no chance

 

[thefutilist]

Before I reply, can you clarify what it is you mean by thematically relevant? It might explain the difference between our viewpoints.

This is a really rough sketch of how I'd use the material and rewrite it to what I'd consider a more thematically potent situation. Don't take this as a criticism though, just showing what I'd do. I'd have to work on it for a few more hours to really beat it into shape. One criticism for the new edition. It would be nice to have a cast list of all the npc's at the back of the book in one place. Locus: Leader of the Goshawks, avenging his son. And so on.


So my situation would be this.

The demon wolf was summoned. Killed it's mother and brothers and went out hunting sheep, livestock. Some it's pack were killed by the villagers. From the wolfs point of view, it's just trying to feed itself and so it takes to revenge against the villages. Slaughtering them as and where it can. In one of those massacres it kills Locus son because the Goshawks are in the middle of a trade with the villagers. From the wolfs point of view, anyone who helps my enemy is complicit so screw the goshawks.

The wolf wants justice and also to find and avenge itself upon whoever created it (Arbela)

Anselm is a flat out revolutionary for Mitra. He says the wolf attacks are Mitra's justice for bowing before the horselords. The Baron should give up his rights and they should elect a new (revolutionary) leader. No harvest until his demands are met.

The Baron can't outright kill Anselm without causing some stuff. So he wants to get rid of the wolf and prove that Anselm is full of nonsense. That way when he tries Anselm later he won't become a martyr. (although there's a part of the Baron that thinks Anselm might be right)

Arbela is arrogant and vain but also sees herself as a great leader and dreams of conquest and rule. She's began gathering some sympathetic mages from the order of Thoth and she's killed the bandits. She did this because some of the villages were crying about not getting any justice and so Arbela proved that she could get it. So now there's a load of villages who are sympathetic to her cause.

Locus wants to avenge his son but after learning about the Goshawks dealings with the bandits, many of the villages think they're as bad as the bandits and want them gone. There are some amongst the Goshawks that don't think it's worth hanging around just so Locus can get his revenge, if he can even get it.


So the rationale behind the changes is that everybody is a little bit sympathetic (from a certain point of view) and their interests aren't easily reconciled. Their interests also criss cross with each other far more. If I was going to spend more time I'd do even more of this so it was a really tangled web.

Then I'd list a few stakes questions like:

Will Anselm follow Arbela?

Will the Baron follow Anselm?

and so on. If I have a few of these that are relatively strong, then the situation is probably fairly sound.