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

[pemerton]

Is the activity "make moves within the fiction; when necessary, use rules"? Or is it "play the game by the rules; when necessary, the referee adjudicates"?

I think it's the latter, especially if you consider "the players describe their action and the referee describes what results" as a rule.

I think the former is a clear description of the original dungeon-crawling game. The principle resolution method is direct adjudication of the fiction. This is most obvious in the way the key exploration moves - walking down corridors, opening things, looking at things, etc - are resolved.

 

[The Firebird]

I think the former is a clear description of the original dungeon-crawling game. The principle resolution method is direct adjudication of the fiction. This is most obvious in the way the key exploration moves - walking down corridors, opening things, looking at things, etc - are resolved.

I disagree. It's not that we sat down to tell a story, and then decided it would be more fun with rules. We sat down to play a game, and decided it would be more fun with some roleplaying.

 

[AnotherGuy]

If I said to you that I find living world to be a vague and unclear term... please come up with another term that accurately summarizes your preferred play style... you wouldn't agree to do so, and nor should you if you don't actually agree.

My stab at it.

Either 3.5e or 5e (2014) described the setting as a dynamic. Now I'm not in a position to quickly see what the edition said about this but I would describe it as a setting where change occurs and is not only reactive to actions by PCs but one should think of the entire setting as the DM's PC which is often plays a solo adventure and which at times affects the PCs as they too can affect it.

So living in the sense that the DM is roleplaying it with or without PC intervention or interaction whereas one may say that some indie games' settings live through the dice.

EDIT: Not all D&D playstyles adopt this living world technique.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If you're thinking of the story where the carousing party charmed the harlot who turned out to be a royal agent etc., that was a hypothetical example I made up for that post in order to highlight the idea of unknown and unknowable possible downstream consequences of what at the time seems like something trivial.

But I have run many a session that was pretty much nothing but in-character roleplay and-or hijinks and-or infighting, where whatever adventure or mission or etc. they were in theory doing didn't get advanced in the slightest. Fine with me; if that's what they want to do then that's what I'm DMing, and they (or whoever's left, depending) can always get back on mission next session or the session after that or whenever.

The game is open-ended, including in overall duration. I'm not running it on a clock; and having hit 1100 sessions as of last Sunday I'd say it's so far, so good.

I find this characterization tellingly off. I have no end of tales of trad play consisting of GMs repeatedly imposing elements into play clearly designed to confirm it to their preferences. This is almost a universal of trad play IME. The general pattern being GMs wanting to avoid having to figure out what happens when the PCs break stuff.

On the contrary, in DW, AW, BitD, Stonetop, and 1000 Arrows play was/is highly dynamic with GM and players constantly doing consequential stuff. It is night and day different. Trad play is IME much more stilted and limited.

 

[Morrus]

I’m in between handling considerably more important matters, but I can’t let this pass unchallenged. This is a ridiculous, embarrassing position that should make you triple take both your thoughts and what you let spill out from your hands as virtual ink.

The person you’re responding to? I’ve GMed several games for this person. This is one of the least self-centered, most thoughtful, most conscientious, most giving to other players (and GM) their earnest interest and creativity players I’ve ever GMed for (in 41 years of it).

Good god man. He’s merely talking about a process of play and resolution that he isn’t interested in and you hit him with calling that (and therefore him) self-centered.

You should really apologize (to him and to yourself for such a ghastly and unwarranted bold accusation and terrible judgement based on a category error as evidence). Go ahead and cue moderation as you like. Don’t care. Thread ban. ENW ban. Whatever. Worth it.

As requested.

For everybody else, remember—if you dare us to ban you, we will. We’re not here to play chicken with you.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Wow. The pointlessly spiky pettiness knows no bounds.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Please stop telling me what I like and dislike. I have told you repeatedly that I sometimes play games very much like the ones you're talking about.

It's not about liking or disliking. It's about recognizing what is happening at the table, and what the design choices allow to happen at the table.

I am not trying to tell you what you like. I am just giving you room for your preferences (that is why I said if you like that, that is what you like). But I am confused because it feels like you are disagreeing with me over whether games ought to allow GMs to have this power

 

[Faolyn]

How would this be resolved?

If it takes (say) an hour or two of play time at the table, where the player is just moving through scenes framed by the GM based on the GM's ideas about the guardhouse, who knows the schedule, etc, and the player is declaring low-risk, low-stakes actions to try and prompt the next scene so that, eventually, the GM will present the outcome of the PC learns the scheduled - then, that it the sort of play that I regard as highly GM-driven. I mean, we're talking about an extended episode of play where all the fiction comes from the GM, and the player is just receiving it.

Questions:

(1) If the PCs in a BW game decide to go to a tavern, who decides what the tavern is like? If the PCs get to describe a tavern, then why can't the PCs get to describe the guardhouse?

(2) Can the GM decide that the tavern the PCs went to has a secret basement room where they hold illegal kobold fights? Or do the players have to decide that? And if the players get to decide that there's a secret basement room where they have illegal kobold fights, then why can't the PCs get to decide what the guard's schedule is like? (Or if in BW such a thing would be left up to the dice, then why can't the dice decide the schedule's detail?)[1]

(3) Why would you consider this to be lower risk and lower stakes than two people arguing about mending armor--something you yourself was high-stakes. Getting in to a guardhouse and getting the schedule is basically a mini-heist, which most people would think to be fairly high-stakes.

--

[1] Or does BW make it so it's impossible for there to be any secrets like this to be found no matter who wants them to be there?

 

[AlViking]

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.


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

View attachment 404803


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 tried to find #5 and couldn't find it, thanks for providing.

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.

Others, at this point, have pointed out the issues with dice dictating what the player does. Because even if you wouldn't call it determining what they feel interfering with the actions the player thinks their character would do is pretty indistinguishable to me.

But when it comes to the example I have to go back to the same question I had before. A duel of wits comes across as a kind of social combat. Why you got into that duel, what the duel is about, all of that can be influenced by what the character said and the history of the game. But when resolving the duel itself, I see nothing in the example that indicates that what the character says, or anything from the characters past actions prior to the duel has any direct impact on the outcome of the duel. Quite possible I'm missing something but I don't see it.

Assuming my understanding is correct, it's not a bad thing if that's what you want. But just like the dice determining the choices my player has available, I don't want social interactions to be that bound to a set of rules. I need a set of rules for combat in D&D because I wouldn't know how to evaluate results otherwise, but I don't want to play a game where social interactions are forced to follow the same pattern.

 

[Faolyn]

I thought the mantra of this thread was "trust the GM"!

That doesn't address the issue, though.