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

[Bedrockgames]

I chafe a bit at this because:


I can extrapolate based on logic, causality and consistency but BECAUSE OF THE TYPE OF PERSON I AM, I'm naturally producing extrapolations that ALSO escalate (in the dramatic sense).

I think you difference her though is Rob ids saying he extrapolates without thinking about escalation, or drama. That is a key difference

So it isn't either/or

You can certainly have both. I can write a dramatic screenplay that is realistic. But a screenplay driven purely by causality, would definitely be a different thing (and it probably wouldn't be super watchable)

You could in fact read Narrativism as saying, play with people whose living world extrapolations tends to ALSO lead to escalations across moral lines.

Which is fine, but that is going to produce a very different game than what Rob is talking about.

 

[Maxperson]

Yes. That was my point: Google's AI answer contains an inconsistency, which reflects the inconsistency of use of the term among RPG hobbyists.

So your point is that AI is unreliable and often wrong? The inconsistency isn't because of widespread use among RPG hobbyists. The inconsistency is because of people like you who invent new(and incorrect) definitions for something that commonly means something different in order to achieve their agenda.

You are insisting that there is one unique, or at least principal, usage which I am departing from. But I don't agree, and I adduce my Google search as evidence to the contrary.

This is circular reasoning. You are using the term outside of the common usage and then pointing to AI seeing incorrect usages like yours to show that you can be correct in using it that way.

AI answers cannot be trusted, and as an academic you should know that well. It's pretty disingenuous for you to be bringing it up here as reliable proof of your correctness.

 

[Maxperson]

D&D is not infinitely malleable.

With minimal tweaking it's nearly so.

It is clearly oriented towards a particular sort of setting - magic-rich fantasy - and tropes - adventuring undertaken by parties whose bonds to one another are stronger than any bonds to other elements in the setting.

And yet it easily runs no-magic fantasy - and tropes - adventuring undertaken by bonds who are stronger to other elements than each other.

You can use D&D to run almost any style decently to very well with a bit of tweaking for some styles of play.

Departing from these orientations requires adding new rules, or new procedures, or both. (D20 Cthulhu is one illustration of what this might look like. And even then, one can doubt whether the mechanical framework is really that good a fit for the procedures of play and the genre that the game is aiming at.)

Yes for some a bit of tweaking is required. That you can tweak to do this things makes it......................malleable. If you could do them all right out of the box, you wouldn't need to bend it at all, so it wouldn't need to be malleable.

Saying that D&D isn't infinitely malleable and then showing how you can use it's malleability to run Cthulhu and others isn't the win you think it is.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And at the same time, everything gets a whole lot blander.

That's what I meant about "people's taste in it." I ran and played in games utilizing RuneQuest and the Hero System as fantasy systems (the first of which is less exception based than D&D has ever been, and the latter of which to there's any exception base in the design its a historical artifact design flaw) and neither of them felt meaningfully bland to me. Plenty of other people have felt the same over the years. Your "boring as hell" is your right to feel, but its clearly an issue of taste not necessity here; in particular, if you wanted to tool up a spell or ability in Hero to fit a particular expectation you could do it; it just wouldn't be ad-hoc, it'd be designed with extent tools.

I'm going to stand by my opinion there's no virtue in just doing these things one-off every time, more cognitive load, and more opportunity for balance problems. I accept that other people feel differently, but there it is. D&D gets a little bit of a pass because of first-out-the-gate and legacy reasons, but only a little.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I mean, games where players have a higher level of authority are going to be more vulnerable to players who act in bad faith. If mitigating players with negative tendencies is a concern, than I would agree that games with higher levels of DM authority are almost certainly better suited.

Just to be consistent here, its not just bad faith that can be a problem, but people who play without paying attention to the big picture of the campaign or how things will impact others. It doesn't have to be deliberate misbehavior so much as tunnel-vision or just not thinking outside one's personal box.

 

[Campbell]

So, here's the formulation:

1. The PCs have vision, self-interests, best interests, passion, an ideological commitment: something they want and care about. Lajos Egri says “passionate.”

1. Their passions put them in conflict with others — other PCs or other NPCs, it doesn’t matter. Their passions oppose others’, threaten others’ interests, provoke others into passionate reaction.

1. Both the PCs and their counterparts are equipped to pursue their passions in conflict. Egri says “fit.” They’re physically equipped, emotionally equipped, morally equipped; they have skills, tools, initiative, stamina, follow through, staying power.

1. Nobody pre-plans how it’s going to turn out. The characters are passionate, conflicted, and fit; now turn them loose. Play to let them pursue their passions. Play to find out how far they go, how they escalate, who comes out on top, who compromises, what they win, what it costs, what they prioritize, what they abandon. The only way to know how it plays out, is to play it out!

There is nothing here about plot points, character arcs, dramatic momentum, interpersonal drama or the like. I really do not see the point in bringing them up in association with it. The point of Narrativism isn't its narrative byproduct, but the experience of playing these characters under pressure. The crucible is the point.

Story is a hair trigger word for many of us. We do not play for it and we do not do things in service to it. This post from Play Passionately elaborates:

“The Story”​

I want to talk about the problematic nature of the phrase, “the story” in gamer culture. In my experience I find that many gamers consider themselves in the game for “the story” when in practice they actually mean several different things.

For example, some people simply mean “a series of causal fictional events.” When talking about their play they get very, very excited about the imagery of the game. “Literary” considerations like theme are irrelevant as long as what happened looked or felt cool on the level of pastiche. Talking about me personally this kind of play does nothing for me. Simply having “a causal series of fictional events”, no matter how evocative or imaginatively vivid, is an insufficient definition of “the story” for playing passionately.

For purposes of discussion here, a story consists of a situation that is built from recognizably real-world problematic issues of human interaction that eventually resolves in such a way as to make some statement or comment about those issues. That commentary is referred to here as the story’s theme. (For more on this see the Premise/Theme definitions in the “Concepts from Elsewhere” link on the sidebar.)

From here discussion becomes more difficult because we have to stop talking about the result of play and have to start talking about the process of play. When discussing the fictional events of a game after play has occurred a theme, as defined above, might very well be present. The next question to ask is how did that theme enter play?

One option is that theme is wholly brought into play via the GM through a variety of techniques. The story might already be over and done with by the time play starts and the PCs are basically in-world audience members discovering this story. A lot of mystery driven games often results in this kind of story. The players uncover clues which slowly reveal to them some interesting story that happened in the past.

Another option is that the PCs might indeed be the protagonists of the story, but the GM has already made all of the significant decisions for them up front and uses a variety of carrot and stick or magician’s force techniques to get them to make the “right” decisions. Often this is combined with carefully chosen setups and dice fudging to also guarantee the “right” outcomes.

A third option is that the story might be happening around the PCs. The real protagonists are one or more NPCs doing things in parallel with the PCs who happen to just show up to witness the key pivotal moments of the story. Most often the PCs act as a kind of reoccurring sidekick or proxy for the real protagonist.

Sometimes when a player says he makes decisions for “the story” he is either one of these front-loading GMs or a player who doesn’t mind being complicit in such a GM’s game. He willfully follows the GMs cues and skirts rules to help the GM foster the situations and outcomes he wants. Personally, I pass no judgment on such play. I just wish more people were honest with themselves about what is really going on procedurally.

On the other hand, there exists a flip side to GM front loading. There is a kind of play which amounts to player side front loading of theme. Sometimes when a player says he makes decisions for “the story” he means that he is making decisions based on his assumptions of how the story “should go” which might very well include engineering his own character’s failure at key pivotal moments. A hallmark of these players is excitement at character creation for what WILL happen to the character up to and including that character’s expected final outcome.

A key tell-tale behavior is either the culling of or enthusiasm over creative input based on pre-play expectations of what “should” happen based on any number of things including genre tropes, assumed story structure and character role in the developing fiction. Play often involves ignoring or fudging mechanics to support this culling or enthusiasm. “No, that wouldn’t happen because…”

“…that’s not very noir.”

“…this is the scene where my character should lose his girlfriend.”

“…he’s a ruthless space pirate and wouldn’t do that.”

“…that’s not how the <fandom>verse works.”

It should be clear that these thematic front-loading techniques are antithetical to playing passionately. Playing passionately is about investing in the here and now situation at hand and acting upon it based on your immediate feelings and judgment. Theme is the result of the processes of play itself…not delivered or controlled by any one person, ever. It does not even include the idea of passing around the control of theme. I often describe play as a formula:

Player A’s Fictional Input + Player B’s Fictional Input + System Process = Unpredictable and Uncontrollable Outcome C.

Outcome C then becomes the new here and now situation that the players evaluate and judge. That new judgment is what informs their next fictional input. When the game is over and we step back from the table and reflect on the final outcome C, then and ONLY then can the theme be evaluated. The challenge for game designers interested in fostering this play effectively is to ensure that the processes of play do not yield trivial, uninteresting, predictable or easily controllable results.

It’s a dance between being an audience and author. We author up until a point of uncertainty and the procedures of the game allow us to watch as audience the outcome unfolds. From that we make new decisions as authors. That is how playing passionately creates a story.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So, here's the formulation:



There is nothing here about plot points, character arcs, dramatic momentum, interpersonal drama or the like. I really do not see the point in bringing them up in association with it. The point of Narrativism isn't its narrative byproduct, but the experience of playing these characters under pressure. The crucible is the point.

Story is a hair trigger word for many of us. We do not play for it and we do not do things in service to it. This post from Play Passionately elaborates:

Where would you place the living adventure I described in the above post Campbell: within or outside this framework?

 

[TwoSix]

So your point is that AI is unreliable and often wrong? The inconsistency isn't because of widespread use among RPG hobbyists. The inconsistency is because of people like you who invent new(and incorrect) definitions for something that commonly means something different in order to achieve their agenda.

AI being inconsistent doesn't mean the AI is wrong. It means the term is used inconsistently. Although I don't think the usage is inconsistent, it's more of a case where there's a more broad reading and a more specific reading of the term.

This is circular reasoning. You are using the term outside of the common usage and then pointing to AI seeing incorrect usages like yours to show that you can be correct in using it that way.

Language evolves because a person or persons makes a choice to use a word in a different way. Language is malleable because ideas are malleable.

AI answers cannot be trusted, and as an academic you should know that well. It's pretty disingenuous for you to be bringing it up here as reliable proof of your correctness.

It certainly demonstrates that the different use cases are prevalent enough to have been picked up by the broad algorithm used to train the LLM. That doesn't prove correctness (because how one use case over the other be correct?), it simply proves that both use cases have previously existed.

 

[robertsconley]

I chafe a bit at this because:


I can extrapolate based on logic, causality and consistency but BECAUSE OF THE TYPE OF PERSON I AM, I'm naturally producing extrapolations that ALSO escalate (in the dramatic sense).


So it isn't either/or


You could in fact read Narrativism as saying, play with people whose living world extrapolations tends to ALSO lead to escalations across moral lines.

I stressed that it’s about emphasis, not exclusion. Emphasis doesn’t mean other elements can’t be present, it means they aren’t the focus. Baker’s approach emphasizes passionate play and dramatic escalation. There are many ways to achieve that in a campaign, and extrapolation based on logic and causality is undoubtedly one of them.

My Living World campaign emphasizes creating the feeling that players have been to the setting, that their characters have lived in it, using techniques like world in motion. However, those techniques are silent on Baker's creative goals. They don’t require passionate conflict or moral escalation. They allow it, but don’t privilege it.

A Living World sandbox works just fine for players who want nothing more than to grab ales at the tavern and plunder ruins. Players like that can avoid dramatic escalation entirely. But put them in a campaign built on Baker’s framework, and they’re likely to find passionate conflict and moral escalation a distraction, something imposed on them rather than arising from their choices.

On the other hand, players who do want character-driven drama with the elements Baker outlined can thrive in both types of campaigns.

And to be clear: the fact that a Living World campaign can accommodate players who don’t care about dramatic conflict doesn’t make it better. In a Living World sandbox, the burden is on the players to ensure their goals align well enough to function as a group. I may caution, advise, or coach, but the final authority over what they do in the setting rests with the players.

This stands in contrast to systems designed to support Baker’s style of Narrativism, which are often better at aligning group goals from the start, because that alignment is part of the system's purpose. The group chooses that framework up front, so everyone is already on board with the kind of play being pursued.

In a Living World sandbox, that alignment isn’t assumed. The players go through multiple steps during character creation, early sessions, and group discussion to find shared purpose. And even once play is underway, nothing prevents a player from deciding to change direction. The only real constraint is logistical: there’s just one of me, and I only have so many hours for my hobby.

But that’s a matter of bandwidth, not a flaw in my approach. If I had the time, the campaign could continue with one player pursuing a divergent goal while the rest followed another. In practice, what usually happens is that the player with a divergent agenda makes a new character better aligned with the group, and the world keeps moving forward.

In fact, there was a discussion about that last night when the party that had an assassin who was a member of the Claws of Kalis uncovered a major threat to the kingdom that was orchestrated by another sect of the Claws of Kalis. The player was fine with making up another character and have his original character leave the group. Ultimately the decision was made to warn the kingdom, not tackle the other group of Claw due to the party's capabilities, and keep the group together as they pursue other goals.

 

[TwoSix]

Just to be consistent here, its not just bad faith that can be a problem, but people who play without paying attention to the big picture of the campaign or how things will impact others. It doesn't have to be deliberate misbehavior so much as tunnel-vision or just not thinking outside one's personal box.

For sure. Apathetic to play, or "just showing up to roll dice and be there" players are a very large contingent, and also work much better with stronger DM authority.

One of my tables right now has 9 players (not counting me as DM), all of whom are fairly casual, and I wouldn't even consider trying to run a game that required large amounts of player agency for them. It would just catastrophically fail. They need a game with strong DM authority just to function coherently.