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

[AlViking]

I'll be honest, if you can't understand @pemerton's posts, that's a "you" thing. Everything in @pemerton's posts here I've seen is laid out logically.

Plus, having threads that go on for thousands of posts with people getting more angry that @pemerton is essential a messageboard final boss with nigh-infinite HP is a long-standing ENWorld tradition.

My purported "lies" comes from me asking questions like "it's my understanding that X" because I'm trying to clarify. Sometimes I state "my understanding is X". I may not be correct on my understanding, but to my knowledge I've never said "BW does X" without qualifying it as just my understanding. I've never lied about what BW does. I may not understand it but I always acknowledge that my understanding may be incorrect.

 

[Bedrockgames]

…because your internal framework as to how play works is being challenged.

The problem here is this often starts to become insulting. I think we all get, you guys have a mode of analysis and an aggressive approach to interrogating game play. But most of us don’t even accept the model of analysis you guys use (and I will repeat, if it works for you, that is absolutely great). But the aggressive nature of of the challenge here very much bothers me and it feels antagonistic, often not like a good faith discussion. It is one thing to have a way of looking at games and wanting to share it. Sometimes the approach you guys take to challenging people’s conception of game play feels overzealous to me

 

[AlViking]

Yes. If you're describing RPG play in a more technical space like this thread, that's exactly how you should describe things. Because we're talking about real-world processes, you should explain things in real world terms.



You should! The fictional space and play at the table are very different things. Trying to make them overlap causes confusion.

If you want to talk about the narrative events of your game, then use "in-fiction" talk. If you're talking "how to play", don't use player and character interchangeably.


Maybe in a technical discussion, you should rely on the mouthful instead of the shorthand. Did you think the shorthand was working for you?

Maybe people should actually read responses when the response is trying to explain in detail what they actually mean instead of just repeating "you're wrong because I say so".

 

[Micah Sweet]

So, a question then:

Do you have total control over your own thoughts and actions? Do you always succeed at the things you want to succeed at and fail at the things you want to fail at? Do you only feel fear when you wish to, and never when you do not wish to?

Because by the standard you're articulating here, most human beings rarely if ever have agency. Anyone with a phobia, for example, simply does not and cannot have agency, because they don't get a choice, they feel the fear and it can be crippling. I, personally, have phobias of spiders and of falling; I don't mind being in high places, even ones where I can see how high up I am, but I am deathly afraid of falling, and will outright panic if I suddenly realize that the protections against falling are inadequate to actually prevent a fall. Does this mean I as a human being can't actually express agency because I don't have control over this? What about (say) someone with clinical depression, or ADHD, or (etc., etc.)?

And this isn't even getting into, as previously noted, things in D&D which defy this description and have for ages. Dragons of sufficient age have a nonmagical, entirely natural (in 3.x, "Extraordinary", which is explicitly not supernatural) "Frightful Presence" which (a) induces a roll (a Will saving throws), and (b) forces the character to be frightened if that roll fails. In other words, for more than 25 years, D&D has had exactly the thing you claim destroys agency, a forced roll which induces a mental state. And as I have said before, 5e continues this tradition, as the completely mundane Spinosaurus Dinosaur has Frightful Presence, and the the equally mundane Battle Master being able to use Goading Attack or Menacing Attack, and nothing prevents an NPC from being constructed so (in fact, many fans have poo-poohed the separation of NPC abilities from PC ones!) Or if using the Battle Master as an example doesn't work for you, the "Warlord" creature (which can be "any humanoid") from VGM and MPMM has a Legendary Action that forces a DC 16 Wis save or else the target is frightened until the end of the Warlord's next turn.

So, what exactly is different here? D&D still allows entirely mundane creatures or effects to strike fear into the hearts of PCs, if they fail a roll to resist it. What makes this different from the things @pemerton has described? Why is what D&D does, and has done for two and a half decades, acceptable, while BW is unacceptable? Per your own descriptions, D&D takes away your agency just as much as BW does!

What entirely mundane creatures in D&D have fear effects? Not saying you're wrong, just can't think of any.

 

[TwoSix]

Also you keep accusing people of having blinders and I think this is an unfair characterization.

I'm saying "if you say X, it seems like you have blinders". It's not an accusation, it's a description of how words come across in their context.

To me that doesn’t feel like an increase in agency because I tend to see agency more as related to my characters ability to take actions in the word not my ability as a player to control the world or the game.

And look, there are the blinders!

When you say "I see agency as meaning X only, instead of X+Y+Z", that looks like blinders, as opposed to just saying "For my purposes, I'm only concerned with agency around X in this context."

 

[AlViking]

Out of interest did the player have a particular backstory for his selection of orcs as his ranger's favoured enemy or was it just I'm picking orcs?

I told them they would likely never encounter orcs in the region the campaign was set and suggested goblinoids (hobgoblins specifically) and gnolls. He just shrugged, said "Okay" and didn't change. This was during session 0 so there was a lot of other discussion going on and I never followed up.

I just mentioned it because it was an odd coincidence that this specific example came up. There are other regions in my world that have orcs, although truth be told I don't really use any humanoid monster as a threat in and of themselves very often anyway. They would have been better off picking something generic like undead.

On a side note, I just noticed that the 2024 rules have completely changed Favored Enemy to be simply getting Hunter's Mark and you can cast it a couple of times per day. All reference to specific monster or humanoid types is gone.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In that case, my request would not be that you add that addendum to your post.

It would be that you presume such an addendum is present in others' posts unless they explicitly say otherwise.

Personally I'd rather add the addendum, and hope others do the same. I prefer the clarity on all sides.

 

[TwoSix]

My purported "lies" comes from me asking questions like "it's my understanding that X" because I'm trying to clarify. Sometimes I state "my understanding is X". I may not be correct on my understanding, but to my knowledge I've never said "BW does X" without qualifying it as just my understanding. I've never lied about what BW does. I may not understand it but I always acknowledge that my understanding may be incorrect.

I never said you lied.

I'm just saying that if @pemerton's posts don't seem clear to you, that's a "you" thing, not an "unclear post" thing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

All this has been core to most of the RPGing I've done since the mid-1980s.

On the assumption that not all of that RPGing counted as "living world" sandbox, it follows that this core is not unique to that particular approach to RPGing. (EDIT: I've just seen that @thefutilist makes the same point not too far upthread.)

Yes. Upthread I posted this:

​

I think I may be less sceptical than you about the capacity of plausibility, as a heuristic, to exclude certain possibilities (blatantly absurd ones). I agree with you that it tends not to be very useful, on its own, for winnowing down a set of possibilities to a unique answer.

I certainly think that we can talk about fiction; and reason about it too. Here's an instance of reasoning about it: Sherlock Holmes lives in Victorian London; Sherlock Holmes, when he met Watson, was not familiar with (then) contemporary astronomical theories, as they were not relevant to his study and practice of detection; therefore, Sherlock Holmes does not read ancient Sumerian writing (given that such an ability is far more esoteric than knowledge of scientific astronomy). Similar sort of reasoning allows us to conclude that Holmes does not know the chemical structure of DNA; does not leave the house naked (by choice, at least); etc.

We can reason expressly about causation too. For instance, if Holmes drops a hammer on a cobblestone, than everything else being equal that will make a noise. In one of the stories, we see Holmes drawing inferences from the failure of a noise to occur (the dog that didn't bark).

But none of this shows that imaginary things are exercising causal power. It shows that humans can create fiction in accordance with various heuristics.

This whole line sounds excessively pedantic to me (no offense @Pedantic ) as if you're trying to score rhetorical points against someone rather than engage in honest discussion.

 

[Bedrockgames]

And look, there are the blinders!

When you say "I see agency as meaning X only, instead of X+Y+Z", that looks like blinders, as opposed to just saying "For my purposes, I'm only concerned with agency around X in this context."

Look at the words I used again, and consider it in context of everything I have been saying in my responses. I framed it very carefully, understanding another person might have a different take on agency. That wasn't blinders that was me talking about how I experience agency