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

[Old Fezziwig]

I took a look at the play reports you posted and a few things stood out to me. One was that Si Juk is now immune to persuasion which I point out because as far as I can tell it means that before that there could be circumstances where he had no control over what their character was thinking.

Right on. I appreciate it.

It's not mind control. If a character is persuaded, that doesn't mean that the character changes their mind necessarily. It just means that they've agreed to go along with whatever's being proposed or their arguments against doing so have not won the day. The player can of course decide their little dude has been persuaded, but it's not mandatory. I'm wary of using examples from fiction too much, as I don't think they're as useful as they seem to be, but when the Fellowship of the Ring decides to go over the Redhorn Pass instead of through Moria, Gimli's not of a different mind than he was before they started up the mountains -- he would still prefer to go through the Mines, but he's lost the argument, so up he goes with the rest.

In part 3, Si Juk failed a roll so had a dream. The GM narrated what it looked like. There were a couple of checks for things like torches, similar I assume to skill checks in D&D. It wasn't clear how difficulty is determined, when checks are required or who decides.

Ob(stacle)s are set in the same way as DCs more or less. The general table is as follows:

In part 4 we finally get into some interaction where the player has to request RP. The description was "Rich finally started yelling, 'No! Can I roleplay first? Can I? Can I ****ing roleplay first? Huh?'" But as far as I can tell, this situation wasn't really resolved in any way because the player refused a battle of wits. If they had done a battle of wits (which is what the GM initially proposed), would what Sin Juk said have made any difference at all? In this, and in the other example there is some role playing and information gathering but anything major that happens comes down to a check.

They do do the Duel of Wits in post #5 in that thread, and, what Si Juk says does make a difference, both in terms of setting the stakes and the fiction (I'm sure that in play there was more, but I've bolded a few places where they do say things -- in the end, the dice will determine how much these statements matter, but all this is going to push into the framing for the new situation, which I've bolded at the end):

I continued, "The Emperor strides toward the Dread Lord's cabin. He holds the sword stiffly at his side, point toward the ground, like a fencer.

Rich nodded. I think he cursed under his breath, "I draw my sword and follow after him."

"Vega shouts at you, 'Si Juk! What are you doing?!' He draws his weapon and runs after you."

"Zhu Kwan falls in beside you, seemingly relaxed and at ease. He doesn't carry any weapons." I think that made Rich even more nervous.

Mino burst into the cabin and the Dread Lord started awake. He was dumbfounded and bleary-eyed. He looked limp and wasted.

Rich had Si Juk shout to Mino, "Stop! Do not do this! That sword is not yours! It will never be yours. You will leave here now with Vega and take NOTHING."

"Si Juk, you said it yourself. The Throne is in dire straits. The Sword, Crown and Mantle are all that can restore us. With them, I can reunite the Niraih and the Crymsah and drive out the wizards."

I described Mino planting his sword in the floorboards and walking over the wall. He took down the Crymsah crown and placed it atop his head. It was a tall, glittering, golden affair, but it fit atop Mino's head neatly.

"Duel of Wits, Rich, or walk away from this."

Rich positively glared at me. I felt daggers in my heart! I had manuevered him pretty cruelly into this position. Just because he wouldn't take the DoW to murder the Dread Lord, didn't mean I couldn't exact far more cruel terms.

Rich agreed to the Duel of Wits. And I think he'll agree with me that we were on a razor's edge here. It seemed that engaging the Emperor on his terms was the lesser of two evils. The other evil was going to result in much blood shed and many oaths broken. In fact, I seem to remember that as I handed Rich his DoW sheet, he muttered to me, "No blood shed. I want to do this without blood shed."

------- cool.

My statement of purpose of Mino was just as I said above, "The survival of the Niraih Throne depends on my getting the Sword, Crown and Mantle. They are all that can restore us. With them, I can reunite the Niraih and the Crymsah and drive out the wizards."

Rich's statement was the same as he said above, "You will leave here now with Vega and take nothing. You will return to your sister and the Throne immediately."

I did NOT have stats for Mino. No prep, remember? However, I knew exactly what I wanted out of him. The young Emperor was coddled at court. He'd never been sufficiently tried, though he was well educated by his father and sister. So he'd have an Oratory B5 and a couple of wises relevant to court, but not much else. Neither did I give him any traits. (His sister, on the other hand, has all of the death-dealing DoW traits one would expect of a princess who runs an imperial court (and spy ring).)

Rich didn't know all this, though! And man was he sweating it! He thought he was going to get trounced right out. His jaw was set and face grim as he scripted out his actions.

Therefore he was surprised when, in the first exchange, I only knocked 3 points off his BoA and he in turn knocked 4 off me.

We went into the second exchange at 4 points for me and 5 points for him. This was the toughest set of actions I ever scripted. I knew that I could knock him out in two actions. I knew that I could win. But I also knew that he could get lucky and knock me out in one. And I knew that he knew that I knew that I needed two actions. And I knew that he knew that he only needed one lucky shot to take me out. So what was it going to be? Would he go balls out with an opening Dismiss and try to win it in one? Would he hedge with a Rebuttal and try to set up an easy win? If he prevented me from doing damage to him, I wasn't going to get a good compromise. So then do I Feint? Or do I Rebut in case of the Dismiss?

We sat there for ten minutes before either of us wrote down an action. The air was electric. Rich was moaning, "I hate this ----! 'I know that you know that I know that you know!'" I laughed nervously and kind of gave off a few "Gah!"s

Finally, we decided. First volley: Mino comes out with a Point. I needed reliable damage. I was gunning for a compromise, not the win. Si Juk comes out with a Feint -- obviously thinking I was going to Rebut. Woohoo! Free Point!

I laid into him and took him down to one point in his BoA. Tables turned!

Second volley: Mino with a Rebuttal. Si Juk with the big Dismiss. We were shouting at each other. We were both on our feet. And Rich does the most ------- awesome Dismiss ever. He has Si Juk fish out his Inspector seal from around his neck. He shouts, "I quit!" and hurls the device onto the floor.

I think my Rebut was something along the lines of, "Come now, don't be rash. Be reasonable. We work well together." I was trying to get under his skin.

I put three dice into attack and five into defense. I rolled two successes on the defense. Bleh. Still, that means Rich needed 7 to knock me out. A persona point and a fate point later... I'm out! He did it, the ------. Knocked me down to zero. ----!

I roll my three dice. I need one success to get the bad, bad tie. I rolled NO SUCCESSES! GAH! Si Juk defeats the Emperor. The Emperor will not take the sword! ----!

Compromise, compromise, compromise. ----, that's a tough one. I thought about it for a good long time.

"Well, my first instinct is to make you swear to be Mino's Imperial Sword Instructor."

"Oh god. That would suck. That's awful."

"Ok, that's good. That's a start. This is a big DoW and I got you down to one. I want more, though. You can have the Sword, but Mino keeps the Mantle and Crown. AND, you use the Sword to drive the barbarians out of the Crymsah." The "barbarians" were the Oakmen or Hersker. Si Juk had spent time at their King's court on this journey.

Rich turned green. "Fine, but only after I've crushed the wizards. And Mino getting the Crown and Mantle breaks my oath with Zhu. What about that?"

"Oh well." He was going to have to deal with that in play.

Compare that to a situation I hit recently. The characters were talking to a military officer. The officer is arrogant and in particular didn't like several of the characters because of who their parents were and some of the things they had done. So he was antagonistic and, in particular, when a character brought up the heritage in a "Do you know who we are" sort of way he became downright insulting. One of the characters slapped him, the only reason they weren't arrested was because the officer had no official authority because of where they were. But the result is that the officer now downright hates them, has an excuse to persecute them further if given the chance, and they are no longer allowed back in their home town where the characters are from.

None of that involved dice rolls, as DM I would never tell the player to roll to see the reaction of the the character. There was no duel or mechanical resolution of the situation. It's still a major event as far as the campaign is concerned. Sometimes there will be dice rolling in a situation like this for NPC reactions but in this case the officer's responses based on their personality and goals was never really in question.

To draw a correlation to D&D, the feel I get is that it's like a combat encounter where the player can add flavor to the game with descriptions and flair, but the important actions are all handled by dice rolls. That description and flair can add to the game but it has no impact on the outcome of the encounter.

Cool, that sounds like it could be fun. Without knowing the context of that scene, who the characters are, and what the stakes are, it's hard to know exactly how I'd play it in BW, which I think might be of interest (maybe just to me).

But more importantly, and I apologize for hitting this point again but it's so important: dice rolls in BW aren't determining what characters feel, only whether they're achieving their intent. Even the Steel roll to commit murder in cold blood isn't determining whether the character wants to murder someone in cold blood, only whether they can at that moment. Regarding your last point, I'd point back to the compromise results in Si Juk Pt 4, bearing in mind the limits of APs -- the narration and descriptions do influence the fiction and results and should influence the outcome of the encounter in the fiction. If they're not, I'd argue that the play is dysfunctional for BW.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Oh, I was making that argument more for trad play! The whole "I'm simulating a world in my mind" is such a herculean task as it's often described that I think anything that lessens that burden is probably worthwhile.



Sure... I think there's a reasonable amount of this, and that will vary from person to person... but no matter what, it eventually reaches a point where it's a negative to play. As I said, my players were turtling and pixelbitching. Play slowed to a crawl and they were second guessing everything. This was because of the shift from a hexcrawl to a dungeoncrawl, and the shift in GMing that went along with it.

Once I realized what was happening, I adjusted and things improved... but it was still eye-opening. The kind of mundane resource management that once was central to D&D play, and the method of GMing that kind of play no longer really applies to how the game works.



Meh, I don't see much of a difference. 'Player-created' also seems inaccurate because it sounds like the GM isn't involved, when really it's more collaborative. There's still plenty of GM creation in that type of game.

I also think it's because we tend to think of these things geographically... but that's not really what's happening. The characters may go to a location and then certain opportunities/jobs/adventures are available to them based on that location. But really, there's no location involved.

When I say "player-driven" or "GM-driven" I'm more talking about who determines the content of play. And I think there are few games where it's 100% the players or 100% the GM... both would seem to be flawed in some way.... most games are a mix. I tend to categorize them by who does the bulk of it.



Sure, but there aren't really locations, right? There's just different lists of content available, kind of like the way a menu works. Select the swamp, and you'll get things like lizard men and willow wisps and so on. Select the pasta section and you'll get things like lasagna and linguini and so on.

You don't ever have to detail the home of the brother's killer, or anything else to do with the brother in a trad-sandbox. This is a way in which the players are limited. They are able to determine where the characters go within the setting the GM has made... their characters have autonomy.

But they as payers can have more agency than that. Players can shape play in ways beyond what their characters can do, if the game (or GM) allows for that.

That agency is in many cases (nearly every game I've ever participated in as player or GM, for example) not desired and therefore irrelevant to the people involved. Calling games like this "low agency" because they don't meet your subjective bar is just personal preference.

 

[Micah Sweet]

To me that's like saying an action movie has to be all full-blast action all the time, without any slowdowns for character development or plot development or (meta) to let the audience catch their breath after that last blast of light and sound. No sense of rise-and-fall pacing.

Think about @Faolyn 's example where her crew spent (most? all?) of a session engaged in roleplaying their characters talking over tea with, it seems, very limited if any stakes involved. From an external point of view that might not sound very exciting but in the there-and-then of that session it could have been (and by the sound of it, was) wonderful.

As DM, if-when these sort of moments arise from the run of play I'm not going to deny them from occurring just so we can "get on with it" (whatever "it" is); and I hold that denying them would show me to be DMing very poorly.

5.5 seems to advocate the "get on with it" philosophy, so I expect we'll be seeing more of it moving forward.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There's nothing wrong with some exposition and interaction with low stakes. Narrativist games even directly invoke this sort of play. Stonetop literally has a move which describes it. So does TB2e IIRC. However, at a certain point it starts to detract from play, and IME that usually happens pretty soon! If people are literally preferring to spend entire sessions chatting without any stakes at all it makes me wonder about how engaging play actually is!

Good thing people find different things (and different games) engaging then! That way we can choose to participate in activities we enjoy without yucking someone else's yum too much.

 

[robertsconley]

when it is clear to me that preference and personal value is all that this is about.

The exception in my mind is figuring out what techniques work the best with your creative goals. That can be a good topic for discussion.

That said, these conversations often get derailed by a few recurring issues:

• Emotional overinvestment in one's preferred style
• Reframing everything in one's own terminology instead of trying to understand and use others’ terms in context
• Failing to acknowledge that different creative goals can lead to different, yet valid, sets of techniques
• Ignoring that the same technique can serve different purposes depending on context and emphasis
• Making false equivalences between approaches that serve fundamentally different ends
• Assuming bad faith instead of starting from a place of charitable interpretation

For example, in Vincent Baker’s post, we find this:

“The latter: no, mostly we aren't going about the right way of fulfilling their purpose. We're held back by our loyalty to the broken old historical approach, it blinds us to what's really going on. We collectively need to do character sheets and what they're for a whole lot better, if we want to accomplish anything.”

This doesn’t advance the core discussion about the role of character sheets. It frames anyone who disagrees as a conservative defending broken old traditions, suggesting they’re blinded to what he sees as the real issue. That’s not just a viewpoint; it’s a rhetorical strategy that shuts down debate.

But if you strip that framing away, his actual point about character sheets supporting his creative goals is coherent and internally consistent.

Is it a better way? No. It’s a way. It may suit the games he designs, but it’s not the only way to approach character sheets, even when it comes to his creative priorities.

 

[Micah Sweet]

To me, if the possible consequences range from an agent might try and poison you in a park through a van will pull up and discharge a dozen agents trying to kidnap you to a coup will occur in your homeland, and a battalion of soldiers come after you, then I don't really know what the consequences are.

And I don't really feel the force of your treasure point: classic D&D has things like the wand of metal and mineral detection, and potions of treasure finding, for a reason.

These aren't mutually exclusive. The latter can easily be an instance of the former.

The players want to play a game. So they have to make moves - otherwise everyone is just sitting at the table with nothing happening. If the moves are to be informed, then the players need to understand, to some reasonable degree, what their position is - what will happen if they make this move rather than that move.

If getting to that state itself requires, say, 6 hours of play, as the players follow the GM's lead as to where the information can be found - first, go to the hedge witch, who will send you to the library, where you'll discover the thieves stole the book, so you have to go to the guild, where the guildmaster will send you on a quest before you can be shown the book - the fact that the players can choose to declare other actions becomes neither her nor there, if the other actions are simply going to lead to a different path of breadcrumbs.

Here's and example of the sort of thing I mean: the players want information to help make an informed decision, and in order to do that all this other play has to happen first, which is not about them exercising control over the fiction but just about doing whatever has to be done to prompt the GM to provide the information

People do research to inform their decisions in real life too. Don't really see a problem here.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The players are declaring actions. That's all you're describing here: they describe their PCs doing something for a reason.

The GM's reaction is telling the players what happens next. Which is not the totality of the fiction, but a huge chunk of it. Until I know what principles, heuristic etc are governing that, I know basically nothing about the control the players have exercised.

I mean, suppose the sage says "I will answer your question if you do XYZ", where XYZ is something or other that the GM has made up. How is that player driven?

Because the players decided that doing XYZ was worth the information they would get? It's still their choice. This really seems like some folks are trying to twist the terms and definitions so that anyone who doesn't agree with them seems objectively wrong.

 

[FrozenNorth]

First, I was told my description was condescending because it emphasized difference. Now I’m told it’s inaccurate because it doesn’t emphasize difference enough. That contradiction speaks for itself.

I mean, it feels like you are being deliberately obtuse here.

Let me illustrate with a different example. I like historical fiction, you like fantasy fiction. If I were to describe my preferred literature as « literature where the characters act like real people », you would reasonably push back that « characters acting like real people » is a feature of fantasy fiction as well, and by ascribing that characteristic to historical fiction only, I am clearly implying a distinction with fantasy fiction.

Similarly, describing your perspective to sandboxes as « consistent world DMing » implies that you believe that different approaches don’t value a consistent world.

This exacerbated my multiple posts across many thread outright stating that granting partial world-building authority to players invariably leads to an inconsistent world.

You're also attempting to reframe my position by calling it a “GM-curated world.” That’s not a neutral term. It recasts my approach as one of authorial control, as if I’m selectively assembling content to guide outcomes, when in fact, I’ve detailed procedures and extrapolations that produce results regardless of what would best serve a character arc.

I would disagree that I am attempting to reframe your position. I am using the same terminology of several posters that agree with you.

It's the GMs world, You're getting the chance for your character to impact it with their actions.

That post was liked by @Faolyn , @Maxperson @Lanefan and @The Firebird. So there is definitely an implication that exclusive GM control of the world is the defining feature of this approach.

We all value consistency, but we differ on what that consistency is in service to. In character-centric play, it supports the player character’s narrative. In my campaigns, it reflects a world that operates on its own terms. Understanding our campaign philosophies will clarify why we approach campaigns differently, and why certain techniques that seem natural or necessary in one style can feel intrusive or out of place in another.

Consistency is the characteristic that information that has been established does not contradict information that has been established previously (or that can be inferred).

It doesn’t make sense to say that consistency supports a character’s narrative or that it doesn’t.

 

[Faolyn]

The presence of constraints may not be (well, clearly is not) to taste, but that doesn't mean it doesn't support player-driven RPGing. Through BITs, players get to establish priorities for play, and the intent/task structure allows for players to have a great deal of control over what success looks like for their little dudes (successes are sacrosanct). And the game never tells the players what their character thinks. Loss in a Duel of Wits doesn't mean that a character's mind has been changed, only that they lost an argument and words alone aren't going to be sufficient to get what they want. They'll have to try something else that's in line with the new situation. Similarly, just because Aedhros hesitates before he can commit a murder in cold blood, it doesn't mean that his player isn't in control of Aedhros; it just means that something new's been revealed about Aedhros and the player and the GM now have something new to grapple with (Is Aedhros actually capable of murder? Will he try again?).

Well, it's a relief that it doesn't actively change how the PC thinks. But I'd still say that having someone other than the PC say that the PC hesitates or that something new has been revealed is still a loss of player autonomy, which isn't something I want to have. IMO, it should be up to Aedhros' player, and only that player, to decide if Aedhros is capable of murder.

(And yes, there are players at my table who would RP this of their own volition.)

It's like, in D&D you have alignments. If the DM or another player said "you're lawful good so you're not allowed to murder that person." That wouldn't be cool. Saying "you're lawful good and murder isn't an LG act. If you murder her, your alignment is going to change"is acceptable, because it's still up to the player. (Yes I know alignment isn't a big deal in 5e; this example uses a different edition.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

The presence of constraints may not be (well, clearly is not) to taste, but that doesn't mean it doesn't support player-driven RPGing. Through BITs, players get to establish priorities for play, and the intent/task structure allows for players to have a great deal of control over what success looks like for their little dudes (successes are sacrosanct). And the game never tells the players what their character thinks. Loss in a Duel of Wits doesn't mean that a character's mind has been changed, only that they lost an argument and words alone aren't going to be sufficient to get what they want. They'll have to try something else that's in line with the new situation. Similarly, just because Aedhros hesitates before he can commit a murder in cold blood, it doesn't mean that his player isn't in control of Aedhros; it just means that something new's been revealed about Aedhros and the player and the GM now have something new to grapple with (Is Aedhros actually capable of murder? Will he try again?).

If these mechanics affect your ability to take actions for your PC during play, such that "the rules say you can't do that", I don't see how that doesn't take some measure of control of your character away from you.