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

[Faolyn]

I don't think I'm misunderstanding at all. My view have been consistent at least back to March 2018 - see, eg this post. And my posts in this thread are basically consistent with the idea of player agency set out in this quite recent thread: An examination of player agency

On a miss - a result of 6-down - the GM is allowed to make as hard and direct a move as they like. I posted an example of what that can look like in the post you replied to - "You’re looking out your (barred, 4th-story) window as though it were an escape route" is the PC "standing and drooling". (Also, in BW, it is the player who chooses the hesitation result; but that seems secondary in this context.)

You're still ignoring that the player is choosing for her character to Read The Situation, whereas in your BW example, a different player forced the first one to make a Steel test because that other player thought he would balk at killing someone.

Also, "You're looking out your window" isn't even remotely the same as "the PC is standing and drooling for four actions." Everything that happens in the AW example you're giving happens at basically the same time.

Of course they are. If my AW PC is a victim of manipulation, and ignores it and thus has to act under fire, and fails, then the GM can make as hard and direct a move as they like. This could include narrating my hesitation, and hence something going wrong.

Sigh. No, they're not. Because, and I don't know how many times I have to say this, the player is making the choice in AW, and in BW, someone else made the choice for the player.

No they can't. I already posted the rule (p 361): "GMs call for Steel tests."

So is this test required every single time a player wants to do something violent?

BW doesn't use rounds. Hesitation is measured in "actions" - what that corresponds to in the fiction, and at the table, is discussed in detail across multiple different parts of the system. In the actual play example that I provided, Aedhros hesitated for 4 actions, which - handily for Alicia, who didn't want Aedhros to murder the innkeeper - was just enough time for her to cast Persuasion. At the table, this is a modest number of sentences and dice rolls: the call for the Steel test; the rolling of the Steel test and the determination or the result; the realisation that this is enough time to cast Persuasion; and then the resolution of the spell casting.

Rounds vs. actions are pedantry here. Aedros didn't choose to roll Steel to see whether he would hesitate. Instead, Alicia "insisted" he roll it.

I will never admit I am wrong is a Belief. Aedhros was acting on it, in ruthlessly trying to murder the innkeeper. Always repay hurt with hurt is an Instinct, and in this context allows me to assert, with no need for a test, that Aedhros is in the room ready to kill the innkeeper.

They don't affect the Steel test. I could have gone for Mouldbreaker persona, by choosing to have Aedhros fall to his knees and beg for mercy (lamenting his inability to prevent his spouse's death) - but I chose not to. I didn't think that Aedhros was yet at that point.

Then they're useless. If my belief is that I'm never wrong, then I'm not going to suddenly think maybe I shouldn't kill this person.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

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.​

As pp 190-1 say,

You can read “under fire” to mean any kind of serious pressure at all. Call for this move whenever someone does something requiring unusual discipline, resolve, endurance or care. I often say things like “okay, roll to act under fire, and the fire is just how badly that’s going to hurt,” “…and the fire is, can you really get that close to her without her noticing?” or . . .​

Those are examples of external pressure, but the rules also contemplate internal pressure:

When you try to seduce or manipulate someone, tell them what you want and roll+hot. . . . For PCs: on a 10+, both. On a 7–9, choose 1:​

• if they do it, they mark experience [the carrot]​

• if they refuse, it’s acting under fire [the stick]​

What they do then is up to them.​

So it seems to me that, depending on a table's norms and what is happening in the fiction, some sorts of ruthless actions could be established as acting under fire.

That a narration of failure can include hesitating, flinching or stalling is established by the description of the move itself. And we also see it in the narration of a hard move following a missed Read a Stich roll, in the section on Moves Snowball (p 155-6):

I can make as hard and direct a move as I like. The brutes’ threat move I like for this is make a coordinated attack with a coherent objective, so here it comes.​

​

“You’re looking out your (barred, 4th-story) window as though it were an escape route,” I say, “and they don’t chop your door all the way down, just through the top hinge, and then they lean on it to make a 6-inch space. The door’s creaking and snapping at the bottom hinge. And they put a grenade through like this - ” I hold up my fist for the grenade and slap it with my other hand, like whacking a croquet ball.​

​

“I dive for -”​

​

Sorry, I’m still making my hard move. This is all misdirection.​

​

“Nope. They cooked it off and it goes off practically at your feet. Let’s see … 4-harm area messy, a grenade. You have armor?”​

(Note that "misdirection" here is a technical term (pp 110-11): it refers to the GM "pretend[ing] that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s fiction" even though "the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make.)

This is true, and as with the example I was responding to, the outcome of Act Under Fire/Defy Danger (definitely prefer the AW presentation here) certainly can be something like the MC making a move which amounts to "you lack the resolve to carry it off." My personal preference is to ask the player to explain it. "You don't shoot her, tell me what happened."

 

[Desdichado]

When you respond to me saying there's a False Dichotomy happening, you are attributing the two extremes to me. So you essentially did say that.

No. I didn't. I can see why you would have thought that, but when I said, no that's not what I meant, why would you double down and tell me that yes, I did?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

...until Snardly XII succeeds where all before him have failed, and goes on to become a superstar...

But it's short-lived triumph, a week later he was visiting the latrine and ran into a red dragon... On to Snardly XIII! Honestly, there are character sheets in my old binders that look like "Triborb VII" where the "VII" is a big eraser smear. We literally used pencils, sometimes grease pens on sheet protectors (stolen from SFB games) for character sheets back in the '70s.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This type of play is only for a few players. It sure not for most players in general.

I find myself in complete agreement with you here. Honestly, it WAS fun, I was 14 or so and video games pretty much didn't exist yet.

 

[Campbell]

30-60 minutes is insanely long for me (unless the game has insanely engaging combat which most do not). Would be interminably long for a lot of people I play with. In my in-person group, I'm pretty much the person with the most patience for like dealing with system stuff and hour-long fights, especially if they were an every-session thing would drive me to tears.

A lot depends on where our interests lie and where the stakes are in our games. Most of the games I run and play violence is usually an extension of other stakes so the idea of spending a lot of time on something that will not move the needle as much as social encounters or investigations will is a bit of a nonstarter.

 

[Thomas Shey]

30-60 minutes is insanely long for me (unless the game has insanely engaging combat which most do not). Would be interminably long for a lot of people I play with. In my in-person group, I'm pretty much the person with the most patience for like dealing with system stuff and hour-long fights, especially if they were an every-session thing would drive me to tears.

A lot depends on where our interests lie and where the stakes are in our games. Most of the games I run and play violence is usually an extension of other stakes so the idea of spending a lot of time on something that will not move the needle as much as social encounters or investigations will is a bit of a nonstarter.

This is an important distinction. In most games I'd run, a combat that was going to run less than about an hour probably wasn't serious enough to be bothered with, per se (of course I'm not using task resolution systems, either, and generally want more detail on other parts of the game, not less on combat).

 

[hawkeyefan]

It's a question of vague vs precise. "It looks easy" is IMO far more vague than a precise "The DC is 7"; and most of the time the PC in the fiction wouldn't do any better than the vague estimate of whether something like climbing a cliff* is trivial, easy, tricky, hard, very hard, or good luck with that.

The vague-form descriptor also allows for the possibility of the observer flat-out getting it wrong. If I say "The DC is 7" then as DM I've just committed to that DC and it can't be any more or less than 7; but if I just say "It looks easy" I've left open the possibility that looks can be deceiving and for some reason it's actually considerably trickier than it looks (say, DC 13).

I would say that the vague descriptor gives the player the possibility of flat out getting it wrong, not the observer. If we're using a system with a DC, the possibility of getting it wrong is determined by the dice and the DC. Not giving a reliable DC? All it does is under-inform the player.

And for what? A moment of play where the player may have a clearer picture than might be possible for the character? This seems designed to lessen player agency for nothing more than a fleeting moment that appeals to an aesthetic preference.

I don't really care though because this is not about the DC I set for this particular cliff. In D&D the default is that the DM decides the DC, the monsters, the NPCs, every tree, bush and blade of grass that is relevant to the game. I set the DC at what makes sense to me. Making accusations and nit-picking things you obviously do not understand does not change that. You may not like the base assumptions of D&D, I do.

I think that the GM’s significant authority in designing any scenario is central to the discussion. If as you say, all details are up to you, than the players’ ability to navigate the decision space in an informed manner is also almost entirely up to you.

And that may be fine if you and your players are enjoying play as you said! That really is all that matters.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the GM has a potentially huge impact on player agency and gameplay.

People like what people like. Personally, I don't want my agency completely removed by non-magical mind control. If it is used on my PC and I fail the roll, my agency drops to 0.

I mean, I wasn’t talking about mind control, but okay. Again, preferences are what they are.

30-60 minutes is insanely long for me (unless the game has insanely engaging combat which most do not). Would be interminably long for a lot of people I play with. In my in-person group, I'm pretty much the person with the most patience for like dealing with system stuff and hour-long fights, especially if they were an every-session thing would drive me to tears.

A lot depends on where our interests lie and where the stakes are in our games. Most of the games I run and play violence is usually an extension of other stakes so the idea of spending a lot of time on something that will not move the needle as much as social encounters or investigations will is a bit of a nonstarter.

I enjoy conflicts of all sorts in RPGs… but yeah, I agree that unless the combat mechanics are very engaging I just don’t need fights to take that long. Especially when so much of what’s at stake is often HP loss and spell use and not a whole lot more.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I would say that the vague descriptor gives the player the possibility of flat out getting it wrong, not the observer. If we're using a system with a DC, the possibility of getting it wrong is determined by the dice and the DC. Not giving a reliable DC? All it does is under-inform the player.

And for what? A moment of play where the player may have a clearer picture than might be possible for the character? This seems designed to lessen player agency for nothing more than a fleeting moment that appeals to an aesthetic preference.

I am frankly not too finicky with this as a GM. I don't mind telling them DCs/TNs if this is going to help them imagine things better. BUT......as a player, I just completely disagree with what you are saying. This is not a simple aesthetic preference. In real life, I am not a computer running the numbers. I can't look at a gap in a bridge and estimate the footage accurately, let alone my actual percentage chances of knowing the risk. The best I have is a sense. So when I am playing a character, I would much rather what ever information I am getting, is a closer approximation to that, than to information my character simply wouldn't have. And I don't see this as a diminishing of agency at all. You have a very peculiar definition of agency, which is fine, but you are using it in this discussion to undermine fairly normal preferences as if they are impinging on agency (which they aren't by any reasonable understanding of the term)

 

[hawkeyefan]

I am frankly not too finicky with this as a GM. I don't mind telling them DCs/TNs if this is going to help them imagine things better. BUT......as a player, I just completely disagree with what you are saying. This is not a simple aesthetic preference. In real life, I am not a computer running the numbers. I can't look at a gap in a bridge and estimate the footage accurately, let alone my actual percentage chances of knowing the risk. The best I have is a sense. So when I am playing a character, I would much rather what ever information I am getting, is a closer approximation to that, than to information my character simply wouldn't have. And I don't see this as a diminishing of agency at all. You have a very peculiar definition of agency, which is fine, but you are using it in this discussion to undermine fairly normal preferences as if they are impinging on agency (which they aren't by any reasonable understanding of the term)

I don't have a peculiar definition of agency nor am I undermining any one's preferences. People can like whatever they like and that's great.

I myself play different kinds of games to get different kinds of experiences. I don't consider any of them better than the other. I may have preferences about which is my favorite, or which is best for A or B... but those are also just preferences.

But no, not sharing DCs and the like is absolutely an aesthetic preference. And it absolutely impacts player agency. We are playing a game. Denying a player information to make choices impacts player agency. You may feel that you have a valid reason to deny the player that info, or to be denied that info as a player... that's your preference and it's fine.

You value immersing in character (or something like that) more than that aspect of the game. That's fine. As a preference, I can at least understand why you have it, even if I don't share it. But I'm not going to change my view so that you get to have your cake and eat it too. I'm going to describe things as I see them, and I expect and encourage others to do likewise.