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

[Maxperson]

It is a strawman because I don't want it to "always" succeed.

I just want more information than "you were hit" if I'm playing in a game--and I think it is needlessly punitive to give nothing more.


Translation: "I admit you didn't say it, I'm just projecting onto you an argument you didn't make."

Which is literally what a strawman argument is. You're attacking a position I didn't take and wouldn't take, because it's foolish.

You said you wanted the DM to tell the player whether using it was worthwhile or not, and defined worthwhile as working earlier in the post, because failure was worthless. The DM can't say worthwhile to use if it would fail, so what you asked for with that language was for it to always work. That doesn't seem to have been your intent, but that is the result of the DM having to tell the player whether it is worthwhile to use or not.

 

[Maxperson]

Then allow me to rephrase:

The player knows that, but the PC does not. If the player has the PC act as if he knows he can't be killed by a single attack, that is in my opinion poor roleplaying.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm not "making it about combat rules". I am not commenting on trust.

I'm asking why combat has rules.

As I said, I think it's about uncertainty. Would you agree with that, or no?

Combat has more rules, because it's a complex part of the game. I don't think it has that many rules because of uncertainty. Unless you are saying that the complexity of combat creates confusion which also means uncertainty, and so the combat rules are needed. That I can agree with.

 

[SableWyvern]

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.

This kind of thing is part of the reason why I don't find any appeal at all in the idea of playing RPGs with strangers.

That's not intended as a judgement on anyone who does game with lots of different people and I understand that, for some people, meeting lots of different people is actually part of the appeal of the hobby. I also believe it's probably possible to game with a lot of different people and avoid any significant issues. It's just that this has never been the way I've interacted with the hobby, and the fact that so many people seem to talk about all these problems they encounter (to the point that some people refuse to believe those problems can be avoided) only serves to reinforce for me that sticking to gaming being something I do with existing friends is absolutely the right call for me.

 

[pemerton]

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.

I dunno if you both were/are rock climbing prodigies.

But my sense is that these stories tend to show that the likelihood of falling to your death from a climb that you start on is not super-high.

So imagining a D&D character with STR 18 (+4), that is one of the strongest people around, and trained in Athletics for a +3 bonus (5th level or higher), thus with an overall +7 bonus, the likelihood should be even lower. All the situations you're describing thus look like they are DC 5 to DC 10 at the outside.

So what would a DC 15 climb look like? And would that trained person not know that they are looking at something that any normal person would not even consider attempting?

 

[Old Fezziwig]

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.

I spent vanishingly little time at The Forge, more at the BW boards. But I didn't avail myself of the resources and commentary at either as much as I could have. I came to Dogs after BW, and I think sometimes that Dogs might've been a better text to read first.

 

[Faolyn]

Have you ever tried showing people what talking to them would look like?

"You did this thing in the game; it makes me really uncomfortable. Please don't do it again."

"I think that ruling you made didn't work well, and here's why."

"I don't know what it is you're expecting us to do next."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

AW and DW don't use conditions at all. At most one PC can convince another to do something, but all that does is mean you will get an XP if you actually follow through, you can still ignore the other character's argument.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The player knows that, but the PC does not. If the player has the PC act as if he knows he can't be killed by a single attack, that is in my opinion poor roleplaying.

Really? Why? That’s so odd.

How can you even tell that’s what they’re doing as opposed to like, being brave or whatever?

I mean, as of third or fourth level, characters aren’t anywhere near as fragile, and in my experience start getting played that way.

Combat has more rules, because it's a complex part of the game. I don't think it has that many rules because of uncertainty. Unless you are saying that the complexity of combat creates confusion which also means uncertainty, and so the combat rules are needed. That I can agree with.

It doesn’t need to be complex, though. You can flip a coin to see who wins. Or the players can describe their proposed strategy, the GM can consider that and other relevant factors, and then he can decide who wins, and what happens to the losers.

I don’t think combat has rules because of complexity.

My use of uncertainty is more about not knowing how the fight will go. Like… the outcome is uncertain. Let’s use these rules to determine how it goes. Does that make more sense?

 

[The Firebird]

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.

You're reading it way too narrowly. They don't end up with a list of keywords that code specific behaviors for NPCs. They play the NPCs as characters.

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.

We discussed this with an example before, but I don't recall seeing how it manifests (with a simple example) in your games.

(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.

The argument takes place all the time with respect to skills. I'm not sure why you think it is odd for social encounters.