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

[pemerton]

I missed this before but...I think this is not how I see this discussion. It's not about giving or withholding information from the players. It's about whether that information exists, whether it is true, prior to the players interacting with it.

Suppose that the player has their PC try to bribe a guard, and the GM has a secret note: this guard is resolutely honest, and cannot be bribed.

What is actually at stake in the situation - how will this resolutely honest guard respond to the PC's offer of a bribe - is not know to the player when they declare their action. The GM is not actively revealing the situation in play.

 

[Faolyn]

OK?

This seems a non-sequitur. For instance, D&D makes me roll to see if I can perform the action of killing the Orc. But that doesn't mean that combat, in D&D, is low on player agency.

No, not even slightly. Because you're continuing to misunderstand what player agency means.

And if the GM has brought the Orc into play because the player has, expressly or implicitly, asked the GM to frame a scene involving this Orc antagonist, then the situation looks like it is probably player-driven.

In Apocalypse World, the analogue of Steel is Acting Under Fire:

When you do something under fire, or dig in to endure fire, roll+cool. On a 10+, you do it. On a 7–9, you flinch, hesitate, or stall: the MC can offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice.​

The bolded words in green are the difference between AW and BW: In AW, nobody is telling you that your character doesn't want to attack or doesn't have the nerves to act under fire. It doesn't always go well, but read the full text of the move, starting on page 136:

On a 7–9, when it comes to the worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice, you’ll need to look at the circumstances and find something fun. It should be easy to find something; if there weren’t things to go wrong, nobody’d be rolling dice. It can include suffering harm or making another move. However, remember that a 7–9 is a hit, not a miss; whatever you offer should be fundamentally a success, not fundamentally a failure.

A 7-9 is a success. It's not a failure. It's not a perfect success, since you might take harm or get put into a bad position, but it's still a success. Also you choose when you're going to Act Under Fire, because you choose to act in a way that triggers that move. And the MC can't say "you just stand there drooling" (one of the options for a failed Steel test in BW) on a 7-9--or even on an actual failure of 6 or less. Instead, you do what you set out to do, but also take a consequence.

In BW, another player can decide that you need to test your Steel, and if you fail, you can't act. You don't succeed at a cost (you said that was against BW philosophy, or words to that affect) and you can't do anything for several rounds.

Plus as I've pointed out, according to the character sheet you attached to your play report, whatshisname, Aedros (I am not going back to look up spelling) has "hurt for a hurt" and "never admit I'm wrong" as traits. With those traits, saying he might hesitate--that is, second-guess himself and think that he might have been wrong in choosing to attack--was out of character. But another player was still able to force him to make that test. Even if those traits gave him bonuses to the roll, he didn't choose to make that roll himself.

Same thing with using a move to seduce or manipulate someone. You, the player, act it out. You choose when you're using the move. Nobody else can force you to roll the dice and miss your turn because they feel you should.

So don't try to claim they're comparable. Because they're not.

Quite frankly, even if Apocalypse World did have it so the MC or another player could force you to make a roll or miss your turn or anything like that, that would still be a bad rule. It wouldn't get a pass just because it's the first PbtA game. And as I pointed out above, Monster of the Week--the PbtA game I run--has it so that if you use the move Manipulate Someone against a fellow PC, they can still choose if they want to be manipulated by you or not.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

"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."

Okay! This is a start. I'll admit, it's a bit thin, but at this point I'll joyously ("gladly" feels inadequate) take "a bit thin" over nothing at all.

Given the descriptions people have given here and elsewhere, I would never think the first statement would be acceptable to any...let's call them "classical" DM since "trad[itional]" gets frowny faces. Like I would expect to be either laughed at or given a look of Stern DMly Disapproval if I said something like that. Discomfort in the player because of an event occurring in, or statement made about, any given campaign has been pretty clearly articulated as irrelevant in the past, so I'm more than a little surprised to see it included here as a valid concern!

The second would be even worse, as at least the former is phrased as a request, even if that request comes from less-than-accepted roots. Everything I've ever seen from literally every "classical" DM has indicated to me that saying something like that to your DM is a 99.9% guarantee of being summarily kicked from the table without prior notice, regardless of when you bring it up or how you phrase it. You've just questioned--indeed, challenged!--the DM on their own turf, and declared their choice improper if not outright wrong. Several people on this very forum have indicated such a response would be...ill received, to mince words finer than a microplane.

The last, at least, seems completely in keeping with the process and presentation I've seen before. But it's also a bit of an odd duck. If the DM is "expecting" the party to do some particular thing, isn't that railroading? I genuinely don't mean to be provocative here, I was just given to understand that if the players are "expected" by the DM to do something, that was...pretty much definitionally railroading, and thus not acceptable. Is that not the case?

 

[Faolyn]

Okay! This is a start. I'll admit, it's a bit thin, but at this point I'll joyously ("gladly" feels inadequate) take "a bit thin" over nothing at all.

Well, I don't have a good idea of the hypothetical you want to talk to the GM about. Give me the actual issue and I can be far more specific.

 

[SableWyvern]

Given the descriptions people have given here and elsewhere, I would never think the first statement would be acceptable to any...let's call them "classical" DM since "trad[itional]" gets frowny faces.


Everything I've ever seen from literally every "classical" DM has indicated to me that saying something like that to your DM is a 99.9% guarantee of being summarily kicked from the table without prior notice, regardless of when you bring it up or how you phrase it.

I've stated on more than one occasion that I fully expect my players to speak up if they feel a ruling I've made is unreasonable.

Part of the reason the game works and there is trust is explicitly because they know they can do this.

 

[Maxperson]

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?

If I had the bulk to have an 18 strength, I'd probably have fallen as the grass probably would not have supported that amount of mass. I was a very thin teen.

 

[Maxperson]

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?

If you want a very unsatisfying and boring combat, sure, you can flip a coin. If you want enjoyable combat, you need quite a bit more for rules.

Yes. That does make more sense with regard to the uncertainty. So yes, the rules would be to resolve that uncertainty.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, I don't have a good idea of the hypothetical you want to talk to the GM about. Give me the actual issue and I can be far more specific.

Alright. I'm inventing this from whole cloth (since I don't play in games where DMs expect functionally unlimited trust), but here goes. I am, of course, making things a little fancier than is needed, in an attempt to capture the "realism" folks have spoken of.

Spoiler: STORYTIME YAY!!! :D

Kyle is playing Ranakht, a dragonborn paladin of Bahamut-Horus, a distant cousin of the Pharaoh on her throne, who takes his faith very seriously. The party goes to Hut-Waret seeking guidance on how to stop the awakening of an avatar of Tiam-Apep the Sun-Hunter, whose coming would lay waste to all of Kemet, Upper and Lower alike, and block the Great Nahal's life-giving, earth-dark waters. But the Hyksos priests who hold sway there are secretive and wary of others, as their foreign-born ancestors once took the crown of Lower Kemet, and they continue to revere Sutekh-Garyx above all others. As the god who protects the desert, however, his aid would be invaluable, so the party soldiers on.
Ranakht knows that, in the holy text, his god and the Hyksos' fought bitterly--but also that they came to a legal accord after, as they saw their infighting for what it was, despoiling the Black Land and the people alike, so he approaches a Hyksos guardsman. No priest of any ranking would welcome an envoy without proof--but how can they get proof to show, without the priesthood's aid?
Hannah, the DM, says, "The guard cannot be bribed. His loyalty is absolute."
Kyle: "But we can reason with him, right? This is the calling of his god, after all, to defend the land."
Hannah: "I'm sorry, he, like any of his Hyksos cousins, can't be convinced. They just aren't willing to listen to you."
Kyle frowns but keeps his peace, waiting for after the session. The party goes on to do other things, never actually speaking to the priesthood at all, and finds other allies in Hut-Waret who can help them understand the ritual being used by the cultists of Tiam-Apep.

Privately, he tells Hannah, "I'm really not very happy about what happened when Ranakht sought an audience with the priests. I know it's not supposed to just be a walk in the park, but it feels really weird and out of place that a devout member of a fellow priesthood couldn't even attempt to get an off-the-record audience with somebody. Like, this really feels like my choices don't matter very much, and especially that the backstory I worked really hard to write is irrelevant to you."

This isn't a player immediately treating things as OMG game over flip the table, run away from this HORRIBLE JERK of a DM (which is what everyone keeps painting as the only possible alternative to complete acceptance under all circumstances). But in this context, I think it's quite valid to be concerned by this action, completely without regard to whether it is backed up by DM notes or not.

In this (again, completely invented) example, if I were Kyle, being told "you just have to trust me" would not in ANY way assuage my concerns. It would, in fact, significantly worsen those concerns. I would feel like I have no ability whatsoever to seek redress, and that any request for understanding or accountability will be met with, frankly, stonewalling.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If you want a very unsatisfying and boring combat, sure, you can flip a coin. If you want enjoyable combat, you need quite a bit more for rules.

Yes. That does make more sense with regard to the uncertainty. So yes, the rules would be to resolve that uncertainty.

Okay.

Why is combat "unsatisfying and boring" with no mechanics, but other things become "unsatisfying and boring" with mechanics? You've claimed there is not just a divide but a hard divide, where one thing absolutely, desperately needs mechanics in order to not be pretty much awful, while the other needs to have no mechanics at all or it will become awful.

That level of stark difference requires defense. It can't just be asserted, or at least not if you expect people to take you remotely seriously.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've stated on more than one occasion that I fully expect my players to speak up if they feel a ruling I've made is unreasonable.

Part of the reason the game works and there is trust is explicitly because they know they can do this.

How does one establish that players know this? Or, to phrase that somewhat differently (but IMO equivalently), what steps do player and DM alike need to take in order for this to be, as you say, "explicitly because" they know. It can't be explicit if it isn't spoken/written/etc., but every single person in this conversation has leaned almost exclusively on the implicit, the unspoken, the "social contract", all of the things that are never said and never will be said.