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

[hawkeyefan]

I don't have any more time, but I will address this one point: because you said it was hunch. You gave them the information with the in setting justification that their character develops a hunch. For me, if I have agency, I should be able to develop my own hunches

No, I didn't "give" them any information. The example was a failed roll making the player think something more is going on. I said "go ahead and let them think that... call it a hunch".

 

[zakael19]

Yeah, motion to strike this specific sub-tangent from the discussion lol. I think we all wandered away from the fairly minor point @hawkeyefan was making.

The example that started this avenue of discussion was about a failed roll to notice a secret door.

I'm not saying to tell the players who the culprit of a mystery is. I'm saying that being cautious about such trivial meta-information is just a waste of time.

 

[SableWyvern]

The example that started this avenue of discussion was about a failed roll to notice a secret door.

I'm not saying to tell the players who the culprit of a mystery is. I'm saying that being cautious about such trivial meta-information is just a waste of time.

Right. Hawkeyfan has spoken. Heceforth no one should waste their time with that and, if they chose to do so, they must be playing wrong.

For some people, it might not be considered a waste of time. That's their call to make, in their own game, not yours.

 

[zakael19]

Right. Hawkeyfan has spoken. Heceforth no one should waste their time with that and, if they chose to do so, they must be playing wrong.

For some people, it might not be considered a waste of time. That's their call to make, in their own game, not yours.

This whole thing came from somebody else saying "if players are allowed to roll or know outcomes, they will Play Bad Because Metagaming."

 

[Bedrockgames]

No, I didn't "give" them any information. The example was a failed roll making the player think something more is going on. I said "go ahead and let them think that... call it a hunch".

That is you telling them what they think. A player in a sandbox where POV matters, or really any player who is into being their character, is going to see that as the GM telling them what they think (I am not saying that is bad, but that is definitely going to disrupt some peoples sense of agency)

 

[pemerton]

We're just going to have to agree to disagree on this one, I've given my reasons multiple times now. How the agency of the player is expressed varies from game to game, but different does not equate to more or less. It's just different.

Given that this is obviously false if one compares (say) snakes and ladders to (say) backgammon (both are dice-and-move-tokens-on-a-board games), I see no reason at all to think it is true of RPGs.

And my experience of RPGing is consistent with this too. I've played in different sorts of RPGs, and have GMed different sorts of RPGs, and have found myself 100% able to compare the different degrees of control that players have over what happens in the shared fiction.

Relatedly, in this post:

I haven't played DW I've just read some of the rules and looked at some actual play. But even if the GM creates some of the world, there are parts that are added by the players, correct? That would take me out of my character's perspective. May not be an issue for you, it is for me.

Here you seem to be setting out a reason why you, as a player, do not want to exercise a certain sort of agency via a certain sort of technique: unless I've badly misunderstood, you prefer the GM to tell you what your PC knows about the geography of the setting, rather than to decide that for yourself.

 

[pemerton]

Like I said above, I really like "meta agency" for the kind of thing you're talking about.

So is declaring an action, and have it resolved via "intent and task", meta-agency? Why is that not just "agency"?

 

[SableWyvern]

This whole thing came from somebody else saying "if players are allowed to roll or know outcomes, they will Play Bad Because Metagaming."

Well, if the original statement was an absolute, I disagree with that as well, and will give @hawkeyefan the benefit of the doubt in being somewhat justified in replying similarly.

 

[pemerton]

Just like saying that a player has less agency because their agency is expressed through what their character says and does with an unrestricted GM determining results. But in this case the player wanted to do something and instead of deciding for themselves what their character would do they abdicated control to the rules of the game and had to roll dice.

No. They chose to stab. But hesitated.

It's not too different from how, in a D&D combat, a GM might narrate a failure to hit as waiting to long to strike.

I mean, upthread you were railing against the idea that a player could just choose to succeed, and now you're complaining that I as a player couldn't just choose to succeed!

 

[pemerton]

Substitute "ruleset" for "game" and see if that helps.


Adventure path versus sandbox being two different ways to use the D&D ruleset (i.e. "same game").


D&D versus any other ruleset (Blades in the Dark, Hillfolk, etc.). We've got multiple threads of conversation in this discussion, but as far as I could tell, yours was part of the one about agency in GM-less versus GM'd games. Er, rulesets.

I haven't posted anything about playing without a GM.

But I know that AD&D and 4e D&D can be used to play a RPG on more-or-less the same principles as I play Torchbearer 2e, or Burning Wheel. (Here's an old thread about it: D&D 4E - Pemertonian Scene-Framing; A Good Approach to D&D 4e) I don't think 5e D&D would be as good as 4e D&D, and it may even not be as AD&D, but I don't think it would be hopeless.