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

[Maxperson]

Okay.

What happens if they don't?

No idea. I've never encountered that. Even when I've run games at stores for strangers. Trust has always been there.

I've had exactly this question asked of my own side with the expectation of an answer (specifically, people asserting that a single final authority is always absolutely required--"What happens when you can't achieve consensus?") I know, for an absolute fact, you specifically were one of the people who asked me that question.

So: What happens when the players don't "instantly agree and [you all] move on"?

I have had ruling disagreements before. The player(s) can give a short argument on why they think I should rule differently. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't and it's not lethal to the PC, they have to wait and have a more lengthy discussion with me afterwards. Disruption of the game isn't kosher.

 

[Maxperson]

I did not overlook that--and specifically edited my post to reflect the ongoing benefit (as I had previously said the spell would be totally worthless, which isn't true--it's just mostly so since the DM will just adjust their tactics around its usage.)

It might behoove you to not try to read minds. It would seem you don't have access to 8th level spells quite yet.

Or maybe I didn't see your post after you edited it. In any case, it's not even mostly worthless since the +5 will very often be enough, even without knowing exact numbers. That and the lasting until the next round make it very worthwhile as a 1st level spell.

 

[pemerton]

That's not true. If the blacksmith clocks you with it, you're at 0 hit points and down and dying. Prior to that, he didn't clock you with it. He "missed" or had some sort of minor glancing blow that took away hit points. The major strike(clocking) doesn't happen until an attack drops you to 0.

5e PHB page 197

"An attack that reduces you to 0 hit points strikes you directly, leaving a bleeding injury or other trauma, or it simply knocks you unconscious."

If you were in my game and the blacksmith swung a hammer at your PC's head and you told me that you just stand there and take it, because you have 40 hit points, you'd be down at 0 with that strike, having forgone your hit points by standing there and taking that direct strike.

Then allow me to rephrase:

if my PC is 5th level, then I the player know that even if the blacksmith picks up their hammer and tries to clock me with it, I can't be killed in one such attempted blow. (Because I have too many hit points.) And that knowledge, as a player, helps me make rational choices about what actions to declare, what risks to take, etc.

 

[Faolyn]

Interesting. I guess questions of player authority over characters mental state is a bit different in this sort of game, but it seems like it still resembles more AW-like PBTAs.

I haven't played AW, but I know other PbtA games use conditions that reflect one's mental state--the other Masks, Chasing Adventure, the upcoming Dungeon World 2e, etc.

 

[pemerton]

This is something that the game doesn't explain well (or didn't when I first encountered it twenty-ish years ago), but, yeah, players should be revising their character's beliefs relatively frequently.

The earliest version I have is the Revised rulebook (2005, third printing with corrections). It says (p 57):

Changing Beliefs
A player may change his characters Beliefs as he sees fit. Characters are meant to grow and change through play. Changing Beliefs is a vital part of that growth. However, the GM has absolute final say over when a Belief may be changed. If he feels the player is changing a Belief to wriggle out of a difficult situation and not as part of character growth, the he may delay the change unti a time that he sees as appropriate.​

This is followed by a couple of examples, both of which resonate with my own play experience across BW and TB2e (in the latter game, Beliefs can only be changed at the start of a session, and Creeds only during a respite - which is analogous to the BW trait vote).

Having a quick look at Gold Revised, the text (pp 54-5) seems to be identical. So I think on this one we have a slightly different perspective - I think the game rules are actually pretty clear on this.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

They don't have perfect knowledge because I'm not playing a narrativist game.

I've always thought about insufficient knowledge being more of a concern for me when we're in a Gamist milieu. It can be really hard to make interesting, effective decisions in the play-space if the constraints on my choices aren't known sufficiently. There's few things that suck more than the feeling that I've wasted a turn or burnt a resource for lack of information about the state of the game.

For Narrativist play, I want clarity in scene-framing and descriptions, and, though I'm comfortable with knowing more than my little dude and enjoy operating from a position of dramatic irony, I can deal with partial or obscured knowledge far more easily. I can always fall back on pursuing my little dude's goals aggressively.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Having a quick look at Gold Revised, the text (pp 54-5) seems to be identical. So I think on this one we have a slightly different perspective - I think the game rules are actually pretty clear on this.

I feel like we've had this conversation before to the same conclusion? I'm not surprised the rules are clearer than I recall or that I had trouble getting over the line. BW was the first game I read with drastically different intentions for play than D&D. It's not impossible, probably even likely, that I smuggled in enough priors to interfere with my comprehension.

 

[pemerton]

It's the opposite imo. If I'm just rolling, then it doesn't matter much what I say or how I interact with the scene; I just roll and find out. If the DM rules consistently, then I can make a persuasive argument or take advantage of the blacksmith's personality to succeed. That gives me more agency.

I don't know if by "rules consistently" you mean in respect of this particular NPC, or in respect of all NPCs that the GM describes as proud (or timid or however the GM has described the Blacksmith). Either way, to me it seems that one cost of this sort of "puzzle-solving" approach to NPCs is a flattening out of personalities.

Your argument about dice rolls seems flawed to me, for two reasons.

(1) The claim that "It doesn't matter much what I say" is perhaps true in your games that use social skills (I don't know about them), but false for mine.

(2) More generally, I have never seen it argued that combat in RPGs should be resolved via player-GM negotiation, rather than dice rolls, so as to increase player agency. And that is the most dice-heavy part of typical RPG play. So I am extremely sceptical of the argument being advanced in other contexts - it does start to look like a type of special pleading.

 

[Hussar]

Ok, I'm Waaay behind on reading this thread (I'm currently at comment 4760 as I type this) so, this might be very out of context.

I see two pretty serious issues with this discussion that are getting ignored.

1. This is a biggie. Most players have more than 1 DM. They have played with other DM's and will play with more in the future. They are not judging the DM based entirely on that DM alone but by their experience with other people in similar situations. Meaning that advice to "trust your DM" is a much higher hill to climb for a lot of players. Law of averages says that some DM's are bad, some are average and some are good. In probably equal amounts. So a given player has been burned, and probably repeatedly, by this advice - they've trusted the DM/GM, only to have that trust broken by bad game masters. Which is going to lead to players being far less open to just "trust the DM" advice in the future.

And this leads me to my second point:

2. Good and Bad sometimes don't look very different from the perspective of the player. Because games like D&D rely on "black box" DMing, where a lot of information is withheld from the players, the events of the game can look virtually identical regardless of the quality of the DM.

Take the example of the unbribable guard. Sure, it's an old chestnut, but, it highlights what I mean quite nicely. The Bad DM makes the guard unbribable because the Bad DM wants to railroad the players into a specific path and allowing the party to bribe the guard would allow them off the rails.

THe Good DM, on the other hand, has decided beforehand that the Unbribable Guard is a member of some order, or has taken some oath or whatever reason, and has made the guard unbribable.

But, and here's the kicker, the players can't tell the difference. Good DM and Bad DM look exactly the same here. After all, the Bad DM can just as easily claim that the guard belongs to some order or has taken some vow, or whatever, and railroad the party. The Good DM isn't railroading the party. Totally not what the Good DM wants. But, from the player's perspective, there's zero difference.

This is why we keep arguing about this idea of the "objective" DM being a fiction. Because, in play, Good or Bad DM often look exactly the same. Even though the Good DM would absolutely recoil at being called a Bad DM and would completely reject the notion of railroading as an intent (after all, no railroading was intended at all - it was a "natural consequence" of the setting), from the player's perspective, there's simply no difference.

 

[pemerton]

I feel like we've had this conversation before to the same effect? I'm not surprised the rules are clearer than I recall or that I had trouble getting over the line. BW was the first game I read with drastically different intentions for play than D&D. It's not impossible, probably even likely, that I smuggled in enough priors to interfere with my comprehension.

I don't recall how tricky I found BW when I first read it. I was using it to inform my 4e D&D play for years before I played BW itself.

The first RPG I remember reading and really not following was HeroWars (my copy is First Printing April 2000). I don't recall exactly when I bought it. But reading around The Forge helped me make sense of it. And it then also helped me with 4e D&D.