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

[Paul Farquhar]

This is a troll, right? Please tell me you’re trolling.

No, why would I be trolling? I expect I know a lot of people you don’t.

And it seems simple wisdom to mistrust the opinions of someone who is unknown.

In this case, the ranty tone of the quoted article makes me even less inclined to value their opinion.

 

[pemerton]

You need rules, or else conflicts between players and DMs will happen, and without any rules for dealing with those conflicts to boot.

But that was the whole point of the example: if there is conflict, then a coin is tossed, or die rolled, or whatever, to see who gets their way.

 

[pemerton]

This is a troll, right? Please tell me you’re trolling.

I thought Vincent Baker was just some rando!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This is a troll, right? Please tell me you’re trolling.

They almost surely are not.

 

[mamba]

Who is this Baker person, and what is their claim to speak with authority?

the guy who came up with Apocalypse World and probably the mind that influenced TTRPG design the most in the last 10 years, whether your like the direction or not.

At a minimum from an intellectual, game theory perspective I am interested in his analysis and ideas.

 

[mamba]

So a person whose opinion only has value if you like his game designs.

to me it always has value, because he has given it more thought than most. I do not need to agree with his game designs to recognize that he is grappling with the fundamental principles of TTRPG design rather than trying to tweak D&D a bit

 

[mamba]

It's not faux shock. I am genuinely getting really really frustrated at what seems like constantly shifting goalposts and "definitions" that last for a hundred posts and then get upended when it's no longer convenient to stick to them.

different people have different opinions, that should not come as a surprise. So just because some people do not like X does not mean that it is unanimous consent that X is not allowed

 

[The Firebird]

See how this goes? The "character sheet" isn't about the character. Maybe - maybe - it refers to details of the character, if that's what our resolution rules care about. But either way, even if so, the "character sheet" is really a record of the player's resources. "Character creation" similarly isn't how you create a character, but rather how you the player establish your resources to start.

It's an interesting thesis but I think it bakes in so many assumptions about how the players are approaching the game already as to not be generalizeable to D&D. It works if you image that RPGs are about improvisational storytelling first, and then you want to layer on some rules. But it's just as easy to imagine the opposite--they're a game with rules first, like a wargame or chess. And then you decide to give the players more flexibility, and there is ambiguity in resolution, so you introduce a referee. In this case it's clear that the characters are game pieces first, and you're personifying them after. With that approach, saying the character sheet has nothing to do with the character misses the point.

 

[mamba]

Every time I try to engage with people by taking their things seriously, they do exactly this to me, AND jump to extreme positions. It's been going on for years on here now. Consider asking @Maxperson about whether the DM has "absolute authority" or not. I did literally everything I could to get him to shy away from that terminology. He adamantly refused--and adamantly insisted that it was, in fact, "absolute authority" as both of us understood that phrase.

When time after time the extreme position has in fact been what people are advocating, what am I to do?

having that authority and making constant use of it are not the same thing

 

[The Firebird]

Action taken by the DM. I had thought "PCs railraoding" was understood to be a contradiction in terms.

The DM has a spellcaster cast power word stun.

Not at all. I am specifically talking about the "independent" "objective" world prepared by the GM--just one prepared so thoroughly, so exactingly, that there is one, and only one, "logical" (within the DM's mind, of course) path forward.

Correct. This can be true for individual decisions but if it is the entire campaign you are not playing a RPG.

Who is causing the group to arrive at a particular destination?

Is it one or more players, having the agency to do actually anything they like, go actually anywhere they want to go, without regard for the DM's prepared list or the offerings they add to it?

Or is it the DM, preparing a list, and then if none of those things are accepted, preparing a new list until eventually the party accepts doing a thing the DM has offered to them?

It doesn't have to happen without any input from the DM for the players to be in the driver's seat.