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

[bloodtide]

By all evidence to date, you either want to bash people into your exact definition of what that accounts or put on a facade that's what you do online. In addition, if taken seriously, live in a very strange little bubble of experience, so you'll excuse me if I'm not going to take your responses here very seriously.

Odd.

My experience does cover thousands of games and thousands of players, so I have experienced a lot. I can only guess others don't game as much as I do. I say things like plenty of players cheat, and then others post things like "in 20 years I have never ever seen a player cheat". And....that seems strange.

My base group is folks I know well, but I play with folks I'm not familiar with several times a year, and don't see this problem.

Edit to add: This is not to say that I don't have disagreements with those players. Just that nobody "rants". Nobody takes up half an hour over rules points. Even when I play with kids, they are better behaved than that.

Guess I'm the only one then. I've had plenty of players ruin plenty of games. They rant and rave about whatever they feel is wrong, and the game ends. It is just two hours of "Joe explaining his version of game physics". And I play in plenty of public places...rec centers, libraries, malls and I see it very often....nearly every day.

Though sure some groups think that it is not only fun, but also playing the game to have an hour long discussion on "how many daggers can you hold in one hand"

 

[Micah Sweet]

I do regularly have downtime in my games but when I see it coming I try to plan it for the end of a session so I can tell my players it's coming. Then they can think about whether or not they want to do anything during that downtime, everything from starting a business to researching a new spell to getting involved with an underground fight club. It's not for every player or group but it can add some depth to characters as being something other than just adventurers.

I love downtime! It's where the PCs really get to interact with the setting long form, without life or death pressure or a loudly ticking clock.

 

[robertsconley]

Regarding railroading, I will include this additional primary source so folks can better judge which definition is accurate.
From GnomesStew 11/28/2005

Interview with Luke Crane

Luke Crane is the creator of Burning Wheel, one of the most successful small press RPGs ever published. A frequent contributor to the Forge, Luke is at the heart of the indie gaming community. He's also the most passionate GM I've ever had the privilege of playing with, and his GMing style is as...

gnomestew.com

TT: Here’s a loaded follow-up for you: How would you characterize your approach to GMing? And how did that approach inform your design choices for BW?

Luke: I’m the most dysfunctional, railroading, “this is my naughty word story” GM I’ve even seen. I designed BW so I’d stop that.

Seriously, I designed BW to force the players to naughty word talk to each other, to think about each other as people at the table, not just numbers to naughty word over. Even in BW, every rule in there is about make choices about another person, not a character. Fight, artha, Beliefs, Trait votes, help, all of it.

BW is designed to speak to the people playing the game at the table. It demands that they recognize that they are all human beings and that they are responsible for each other’s fun.

I did all of that to try to mend the horrible dysfunction at my own table. Because I’m a terrible GM. Or used to be. Maybe I’m better now. I dunno. How you like them apples?

 

[Maxperson]

I've clarified it a few times for you now, Max. I'll do it one more time.

The GM makes decisions about the game that he's going to run. Not the game system he uses, though that's involved, but the campaign or one-shot or whatever it is he's going to run. The game.

The things the GM creates for the game... NPCs, locations, factions, creatures, items... all of those serve two purposes. One is as an element of the fiction. The other is as an element of the game. When the GM is making decisions and creating things, he should be thinking about both.

If you want to agree or disagree with that point, feel free.

It really depends on what you are adding and why. The overwhelming majority of the time I'm not considering game play when I add in NPCs, factions, items, etc. The primary time I do consider it is when I am planning encounters, because XP and challenge are inherent to the play of the game, so it has to be a consideration. Very occasionally a randomly rolled magic item will be discarded as too boring or too powerful, which would be game play consideration.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is interesting because there is no 'few weeks prior', there is just stuff the GM or scenario writer made up. You can't cite the reason as being 'it was plausible they were fencing loot' because there is no loot to fence. When not in the prep stage I'm more sympathetic to appeals to plausibility but in the prep stage it makes no sense because there is nothing to extrapolate from.

Right, this is quite incisive. It's the key element of the GM-centered and directed nature of living world play. The problem I have, why I go further and describe ALL plausibility as simply GM-directed, is that the assertions made as to the robustness of the much vaunted GM adjudication of what is plausible, what the narrative constraints are on the GM, is tissue paper. GMs do what they feel like doing. These appeals to 'logic' or whatever are just lampshades.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Odd.

My experience does cover thousands of games and thousands of players, so I have experienced a lot. I can only guess others don't game as much as I do. I say things like plenty of players cheat, and then others post things like "in 20 years I have never ever seen a player cheat". And....that seems strange.

I don't play as much as I used to, but I've been gaming for a half century and was much more so when younger (and with a wider range of players), and I won't say I've never seen problem players, but--with the frequency you talk about it? I not only haven't seen it, I haven't even seen anyone before you talk about it in that kind of frequency. When it comes up its usually in the context of said player being a standout problem child, not the common case.

So being charitable and assuming you're sincere, you really need to learn you're almost certainly an extreme outlier here.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Right, this is quite incisive. It's the key element of the GM-centered and directed nature of living world play. The problem I have, why I go further and describe ALL plausibility as simply GM-directed, is that the assertions made as to the robustness of the much vaunted GM adjudication of what is plausible, what the narrative constraints are on the GM, is tissue paper. GMs do what they feel like doing. These appeals to 'logic' or whatever are just lampshades.

This sort of dismissiveness is exactly the sort of thing that picks fights.

 

[Pedantic]

Right, this is quite incisive. It's the key element of the GM-centered and directed nature of living world play. The problem I have, why I go further and describe ALL plausibility as simply GM-directed, is that the assertions made as to the robustness of the much vaunted GM adjudication of what is plausible, what the narrative constraints are on the GM, is tissue paper. GMs do what they feel like doing. These appeals to 'logic' or whatever are just lampshades.

That's just ridiculous on the face. GMs sign up for all kinds of constraints, and clearly go out of their way to design entirely new constraints for themselves. "It's not possible for a person to accurately use simulated causality consistently as the basis for their decision making" as a critique does not lead to "and therefore they do whatever they feel like doing."

 

[AlViking]

Right, this is quite incisive. It's the key element of the GM-centered and directed nature of living world play. The problem I have, why I go further and describe ALL plausibility as simply GM-directed, is that the assertions made as to the robustness of the much vaunted GM adjudication of what is plausible, what the narrative constraints are on the GM, is tissue paper. GMs do what they feel like doing. These appeals to 'logic' or whatever are just lampshades.

I call BS. I'm sorry, but in my game the story that emerges from play is frequently significantly different from anything I had imagined. I outline general factions of or with various power levels because I know that as the campaign progresses I'll want threats appropriate to their level. I don't really have much detail for most of these things because it can be a waste of time when the players decide they want to go a completely different direction, as is happening with two different campaigns I'm currently running. I had some vague ideas of what they were going to encounter which now goes onto the back burner, maybe to have some impact on the current campaign, maybe for the future.

Do I create the world? Sure. Someone has to. If it were a collaborative playstyle game it would just be designed by more people. Which is neither better nor worse, but if the GM building the world is a facade, then so is every fictional environment we using in an RPG. Worlds of fiction come from what we imagine. But what I create is heavily influenced by the desires of the players, sometimes expressed out of play and sometimes just what they show interest in or the direction they choose to go. It's a different style of influence than other games have but GM-centered is a strawman for a living world sandbox game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But the problem with this is pretty evident in the way you guys talk about prep and sandboxes. It is treated as a kind of lifeless matter, for the players to discover, perhaps interact with a bit, but not something that is hugely dynamic and responsive to what the players do. This is pretty consistent when you guys are talking about sandbox (even when you speak of it and talk about how you like it). You can call it poetry if you want, I think there is more than poetry going on in our descriptions of sandbox, but I think on the opposite end from poetry you have a kind of sterility that is overly reductive and as I have been saying, misses many of the important details and nuances of the interactions between player and GM (which we have all gone over exhaustively so I don't see any value in revisiting)

See, I don't think that. I am sure various forms of play can, and often do, produce interesting and dynamic situations. I'm strictly interested in how they arise and where they come from, and their thematic nature. Typical sandboxes focus on GM originated concerns, and -as @robertsconley points out- don't care about thematic elements at all beyond genre.