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

[Paul Farquhar]

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.

His rantyness and in some cases complete garbage in that one article, rather puts me off. People worth paying attention to are calm, reasoned and open to other opinions.

In my mind, a character sheet is a token of participation, and in that sense what is written on it doesn’t much matter. What makes that character an individual largely exists in the imagination of the player.
But this: “Imagine Thatcher's London. Imagine a person in Thatcher's London who has everything to lose” is definitely not a character, in any sense of the word. It describes a situation.

As for Apocalypse World, a game that isn’t D&D isn’t D&D. It will have its own design philosophy that is not relevant to games that are not Apocalypse World.

 

[AlViking]

Wait, what? The game doesn't allow the players to roleplay out a situation on their own? They have to roll the dice and adjust their behaviors to what the dice say? Am I understanding that correctly? I think I am, because I googled it and found more questions about it on the BW forum that seem to say yes, BW constrains your character's behavior, but I want to make sure.

I can't address anything else in your comment until I get clarification on this. Because if this is the case, (a) I cannot imagine why you think that "Burning Wheel supports player-driven RPGing" when no, it doesn't--even if it only takes over during duels of wits or at times like that, the game is very much not letting the player drive even their own characters; and (b) this game just moved from "not something I'd want to run but I'd play it" to "game I will not touch with an 11-foot pole."

That was my impression as well, and to me it would make the game feel like one long skill challenge. What you're asking seems logical, if there isn't room in the rules for a GM to just make a call then everything falls back on the dice. You can dress it up with RP, but you can't change anything with RP.

I'm not surprised @pemerton didn't answer the question even if it seems pretty fundamental to how the games play. Maybe I also completely misunderstand and there's more to it but at this point we may never know. I tried to watch a live play stream intro with 1 player and after half an hour of character creation I gave up. Meanwhile without clarification I agree 100%. It seems like guardrails are so narrow that to me that there is no way I would play this game. As a player or GM I want the players to have the freedom to interact with the world through their character that doesn't have to follow these rigid game rule constraints.

 

[AlViking]

Sorry, I'm not following.

It's not like the players can declare that there is a red dragon a point X. The DM does that. The DM tells the players, there is a Red Dragon here. Because of the level system, if the players are insufficient level, they cannot go there (or, well, they can but very, very likely won't). Which means that the players go off and do other stuff, only returning to this place once they have sufficient firepower. How is this not the DM more or less driving the campaign? I plonk down numerous locations. Some of them will be too dangerous for the characters. Some of them will be more or less plausible for the players to handle. So, I've now carved out a pretty clear path of "don't go here (yet)" and "here is a good place to go for interesting stuff to happen". The path of the campaign is going to follow those road signs pretty predictably.

My whole point for all of this is the argument that "sandbox allows so much freedom" is that this "so much player freedom" isn't quite as much as people want to claim. The truth is, the difference between a sandbox campaign and pretty much any other campaign isn't anywhere near as big as people like to believe. The amount of freedom for the players is going to depend so much on the DM that it's not really possible to say that sandbox campaigns allow maximum player choice.

There's a big difference between a linear campaign and sandbox to me. Yes, I come up with typically 3-4 different hooks the players can follow but I also encourage them to come up with their own and they do. In addition what happened in current or past episode also has big impact on what possible hooks there are and what direction the players can go both opening up opportunities and limiting them. I had a recent session where a military officer was verbally goading the characters (it's just kind of who he is) and one of the characters slapped him. They would have been arrested on the spot had it been an option, while that wasn't practical the characters can no longer return to their home base. In a linear game there's basically one option to chose from, even if there are optional side-quests at times.

Is it maximum number of choices? Not sure what that even means, we don't have "maximum number of choices" in real life either. Procedurally generating option(s?) doesn't seem to really change anything either since it's even less dependent on what happened in previous play.

tldr: players in sandboxes have more options, no one is claiming truly unlimited options is required or even desirable.

 

[mamba]

His rantyness and in some cases complete garbage in that one article, rather puts me off. People worth paying attention to are calm, reasoned and open to other opinions.

I saw no rantiness in that quote. You also should heed your own words, your recent posts about Baker do not sound like you are open to other opinions, see

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

 

[AlViking]

I completely fail to understand it why you'd even want to, but there are definitely people on this board and elsewhere who claim to play without trust.

It's an utterly alien position to me, but there are people who seem to genuinely mean it.

Trust but verify is my motto. Sometimes a GM just doesn't click with me or they run a game I don't want to belong to. But I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and a chance to prove themselves or not. It's always worked for me even if that means the GM only ran 1 session.

 

[Maxperson]

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?

Again and again you conflate the DM having that authority with the DM abusing that authority. The DM is given the authority to do anything by the DMG. To abuse that authority to override consent, railroad the players and other violations of the social contract would rightly cause the DM to lose his players.

Just because you have the authority to do something, doesn't mean that it's right to use it for that purpose.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Again and again you conflate the DM having that authority with the DM abusing that authority. The DM is given the authority to do anything by the DMG. To abuse that authority to override consent, railroad the players and other violations of the social contract would rightly cause the DM to lose his players.

Just because you have the authority to do something, doesn't mean that it's right to use it for that purpose.

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. [...] There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it." Lord Acton, to Bishop Holden

 

[Bedrockgames]

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. [...] There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it." Lord Acton, to Bishop Holden

I think this is a hit over the top

 

[SableWyvern]

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. [...] There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it." Lord Acton, to Bishop Holden

Because your average GM is certainly comparable in power, influence and authority to the Pope...

 

[Maxperson]

This is a good example of you reinterpreting someone's position into something that makes no sense. @Maxperson is saying the DM has absolute authority over the game world. They do not have authority over your character, or what they do. Moreover, they only have that authority because the players have chosen to give it to them.

The DMG gives DMs the authority to do even those things, but if the DM actually used it, he'd lose his players so fast his head would spin, and he'd have no game at all. So in that sense the bolded is true.

Clearly, this requires the players to appoint someone they trust to be imaginer-in-chief. If you cannot trust anyone you cannot play D&D.

This is also very true.