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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Thing is, though, there's elements of play (mostly involving social encounters and roleplay) that don't need to be abstracted, and the question becomes one of whether or not to abstract them anyway. To this my answer is almost always go with non-abstraction where the choice exists.

Well, this is your contention. OTOH I contend that any conflict situation, any place where an issue can be in doubt and the outcome has fictional significance, then adjudication is recommended, and mechanics are helpful. At least from my PoV one of the main attributes of Narrativist systems is structuring play loops such that the system mediates these outcomes pretty universally. Even, BW, which has a bunch of subsystems has a core loop like this and presents additional possibilities as elaboration of the core methods.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I was talking about rules in general. They are not totally unrelated, sure, but within the context of the thread, they are distinct things.

The standard "Old School <insert your preferred R word here>" attitude is that rules are the worst thing ever inflicted upon TTRPGs. Doesn't matter what they're for. Get rid of 'em unless you can't--and minimize them as much as physically possible if you truly can't eliminate them. Make everything ad-hoc processes, a Weierstrass function of fractal roughness. The idea that a rule could ever be a useful tool for anything at all, for any pat of the gameplay experience, is treated as something only a fool could think.

That is an Old School view, and I respect it, but other schools of thought exist and are just as valid. It's all a wondrous tapestry of opinions and methods, right?

 

[The Firebird]

I would agree that they are better traits to apply in play. Whether they are more likely? I don't know, given how vociferously people defended the GM's ability to declare that a guard simply could not be bribed.

I think "doesn't respond well to bribery" is the same type of trait as "doesn't respond well to flattery".

 

[Maxperson]

I have been saying quite a lot that these things are not about trust.

Like, when combat breaks out, I don't think to myself "oh, here's the part where there's no way I can trust the GM, good thing there's all these rules!"

Are combat rules about trust?

I would think that what they're about is creating uncertainty. For the players, yes... but also for the GM. No party involved in this part of the game is going to just decide how it goes.

Many folks like that to be the case not just with fights... but with other interactions, also.

Appeals to trust seem misplaced.

This is a Strawman. The portions that are about trust are the ones where the DM is issuing rulings, interpretations, house rules, world creation, interpretation of interactions between PCs and the environment described, etc. Not the combat rules.

Trust is about when the DM is stepping outside of the rules or appears to be.

Trying to make it about combat rules and then arguing your creation, instead of talking about the actual issue, is a clear Strawman.

 

[AlViking]

When I was a teenager I went to Yosemite with my family and a good friend of mine. We decided to hike up to Vernal Falls, which has a relatively easy path up. On the way up my buddy and I found a small path that also went up, but broke off from the main trail. We took it of course, being kids, and about a thousand yards or so up, the path began to narrow. My buddy went back down and then up to the main trail. I decided that I didn't want to have wasted my time, have to go back down, and then rush to catch up to my family, so I continued on.

Not to much farther up the path narrowed to about a hands width, angled slightly down and then just vanished. If you've ever hiked to Vernal Falls, you know the path in question borders the river that is full of boulders. Falling in would be death. Being young and stupid, I did the dumbest thing of my life and looked up the cliff to the main path. It was only 12-15 feet up and there were handholds and footrests all over. The cliff, though, was not straight and what I did not realize until after I had climbed halfway up, was that the cliff smoothed out for the second half of the climb.

So here I was hanging off the side of the cliff and those hand and footholds I used to come up were very small, so going back down meant I was likely to slip and if I slide onto the hands width that was angled down, off I would go. Looking up again I notices some grass growing here and there in the cliff face. I grabbed one tuft of it and pulled. It held and seemed like it would support me. So being that immortally stupid teenager, I held that grass and used the remaining body length of hand holds as foot rests. I'm here typing, so the grass held. When the foot rests ended I was at a point where I could reach over the top of the cliff and I pulled myself up to the main path.

I've had similar experiences, I really liked climbing when I was a kid and back and between family vacations and Scouts and we were our own devices far too often. So climbing up and things getting steeper than expected, rock strata changing from solid to what looked like easy climbing but rocks were breaking off left and right to one of my buddies almost touching a rattlesnake when reaching for a handhold. Unless it's a cliff face that others have done you just don't know what you're going to hit. Even serious rock climbers can and do get into trouble. I'm sometimes amazed we survived.

In any case, I think uncertainty and a variety of challenges can be an important part of the game.

 

[Maxperson]

It’s easy enough for the DM to control the outcome if they choose too. Fudging rolls, adding additional enemies or allies, choosing foes that exploit a party’s strengths or weaknesses, etc. If you don’t want that you have to trust the DM not to cheat. Because cheating is easy. In any game, not just D&D. Last time I had to play Monopoly I cheated, since its such a boring game and I wanted to get it over as quickly as possible.

Just a nitpick, but the DM can't cheat since by RAW he isn't beholden to the rules, they are beholden to him. The DM can abuse his authority, though, which is what you are describing above.

 

[Maxperson]

I've had similar experiences, I really liked climbing when I was a kid and back and between family vacations and Scouts and we were our own devices far too often. So climbing up and things getting steeper than expected, rock strata changing from solid to what looked like easy climbing but rocks were breaking off left and right to one of my buddies almost touching a rattlesnake when reaching for a handhold. Unless it's a cliff face that others have done you just don't know what you're going to hit. Even serious rock climbers can and do get into trouble. I'm sometimes amazed we survived.

In any case, I think uncertainty and a variety of challenges can be an important part of the game.

I had meant to mention it in my post, but forgot. A few years after my climbing incident, I read an article about a young couple who fell into the same rocky river area that I was climbing in. Their bodies were never found. It's assumed they got wedged into the rocks under the water somewhere.

That was a very sobering moment for me.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

3. Ask questions of your GM if you're unsure, and trust that they are providing the best answers they can.

Yeah, we got tired of King George and fired him. We're doing fine thx

 

[Faolyn]

Stakes is a very interesting answer... and one of the reasons I was asking. Something more about the game than just about the fiction.

I would likely approach it this way, too. What's at stake in this situation? You're describing ways to handle it in Stonetop, so I won't go into that.

With something more like 5e D&D... it depends on context for sure. But this kind of thing is generally about what it may cost the PC. In old school D&D, the attrition of mundane resources and even others like hit points. But in 5e, gear matters less, and certainly things like rations and the like are not often tracked. Hit points are trivially regained.

So given all that, is this situation with the cliff meaningful to play in any way? Like if whatever impact it has isn't lasting at all, then what's the point? Why bother with it?

Because it could be fun, particularly if its narrated well.

And yes, D&D does make things like gear and rations less important, which is one of the reasons I switched to Level Up. In that game, this cliff would be an exploration challenge, and failure to climb it would likely cause the PCs to gain exhaustion and lose Supply and be delayed in the travels, but they would still actually get up the cliff (because obstacles you can't get around at all are boring).

(Or at least 5.14 did; I have no idea if they've changed things in 5.24.)

If the cliff is just part of some larger encounter or situation, then okay, it may make more sense.

And this as well. Have the PCs get attacked in the middle of a climb. Have them need to climb the cliff before the horrible thing catches them (giant swarm of monsters that would be dangerous if it caught them but can't climb, or a (un)natural disaster or something like like).

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't think most "living world" folks use it that strictly. If there are 3 roughly equally realistic outcomes and one is interesting and two are boring as hell, there's nothing wrong with using the interesting one.

That's true, but generally speaking narrative concerns are far the top of my priority list.