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

[Micah Sweet]

It's not about "some games I favor", Micah. It's about "this advice no longer really applies to many games". Because play has expanded beyond the challenge of a dungeon, which is something a neutral arbiter is useful for.

Given that you've not offered any insight as to why you think it is still broadly useful advice, I can for now only conclude that you're doing so reflexively... out of the kind of conservatism this thread was started to discuss. Maybe I'm wrong... but it's hard to say.

What makes a neutral arbiter so useful to 5e D&D, would you say?



Okay... there is, to me, nothing at all more "organic" about what you've been talking about.

In any game that values verisimilitude and setting logic over drama and personalized character development, dungeon-based or otherwise, the GM as neutral arbiter is IMO very useful advice, because it allows the setting to operate in a way that doesn't strongly favor any particular participant's judgement. This includes the GM if they are adhering to setting logic and verisimilitude as principles, especially if they are using tables as a tool.

 

[Micah Sweet]

wait wouldn’t you say there is a difference between games where the set up or system encourage drama regularly and one where you just let it happens on its own if it arises but you can take it or leave it?

Apparently only if the reasons why particular results occur, and not just that they occur, matters from your perspective.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But isn't getting people on the same page mainly a means to set and manage expectations? If the car explodes in a big fireball after being shot and a player complain "that is not plausable", they would probably come around to accept it as plausible if you just clarify that this is a game based on over the top action logic. And the thing that has changes is the player's expectation regarding the causal relationship between shooting something and how dramatic the effect will be.

I would hope that the fact the game is based on over the top action logic was made clear back in session 0.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It is coming from both ends. You have a sense of a world and what the plausibility of that world ought to be, and you explain to the players what that is, so they have their expectations set. And if you are talking strictly about, here is a realistic setting and the GM is trying to do only what would be plausible in the real world, I think it is still something where the GM has to do the mental work to figure out what is plausible, but the players are ultimately the ones judging his or her decision. So I don't think plausibility magically vanishes, it just means it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Like if you are using real world physics, as a GM you probably want to find out how real world combustion works when that sort of thing comes up. That isn't just about player expectations, because if their expectations aren't in alignment with what would happen, when they call foul, the GM can show them, 'no this is what happens if you fire a bullet through a full tank gas in the real world'.

I do think it is totally fair to reach out to players though and to not pretend like you know things you don't. For example if I have a player in my group who is a doctor, I am probably going to ask him medical questions during a scenario so I can get things right (like "how long does blood take to dry"). I think that is fair. If you have players at the table who know things, bringing in their knowledge can be useful.

My wife is a nurse and a survivalist. I ask her those kinds of questions at the table all the time.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't think there is an "evolutionary chain". But I think that if one poster refers to their play in terms of "outgrowing" a particular approach to play, it's presumably OK for others to respond with their comparable experiences.

Personally I'm not really comfortable with the term in this context regardless of who's using it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not if the account of the point is accurate!

If a poster says that their game does this thing <a visit> that is different from other games' things <a portrayal>, I'm allowed to respond to that. Aren't I?

You suggested what their point was and then attacked that point. Did the person you responded to confirm that your suggestion was accurate?

 

[DinoInDisguise]

Yet another argument that a factor considered a cornerstone of a particular playstyle isn't a real thing.

Great.

You add that part to my post in your reading of it. For clarification purposes;

I think plausibility is fairly universal to most creative fiction. My post was because people were separating it from player expectations, as another poster commented on. When I think it's a subset of player expectations. This same argument would apply to novels as well.

If a player expects things to be "plausible" by earth standards, that is a player expectation. If I set player expectations through a session 0 to be based around a homebrew world with a red star, what is plausible changes. What a player expects changes.

You can do the same in a novel through title, cover, and how you introduce the world. You see this very practice in fantasy novels all the time. Where they demonstrate the "rules" in the beginning, and stick to those rules later on. This is to show what is "plausible" and to set the expectations of the audience.

This can be done with earth-like plausibility, by just not addressing it. It is than an assumed expectation. But when you deviate from the known, you have to reset the expectations of the audience through a session 0 or through the narrative of a book.

So no. My post had absolutely nothing to do with play style. Just that expectations are a umbrella that covers plausibility.

TLDR: You can still value plausibility. It's just not separate from player expectations.

 

[SableWyvern]

Though I'll just note that can be an endless cycle if what seems "plausible" even in genre-convention sort of ways isn't consistent across observers. Its one of the reason I'm not a fan of systems that lean into GM judgment calls heavily; it can make it very difficult for players to properly assess cause-and-effect.

I will absolutely agree this style of play requires a group where everyone is sufficiently aligned in their expectations and understanding and there there are processes to deal with misunderstandings.

For those people who haven't been in a position where there is that level of alignment within a group, I can see how they would be leery of the process, and certainly disinclined to use it in their own games.

I don't want to rehash the trust debate, but it seems pretty clear that some of us have found it normal and standard to have groups where this kind of refereeing is able to work without much effort, while others have found such situations to be extreme outliers.

 

[SableWyvern]

And incidentally, there are plenty of people who enjoy Dungeon a Week or some such, and I wouldn't consider any of them as folks are yet to "outgrow" it, nor do I think there's some sort of evolutionary chain leading to those games @pemerton and his fellow Narrativists prefer.

People can even enjoy completely contradictory styles. I'm currently running a game in a style that is in complete opposition to everything I'm arguing for in this thread. Last session, a player voiced a belief about what might be going on and I decided to make that the reality, even though in one of my more standard games, they would simply have been wrong.

My players are aware I'm running this game according to different ground rules than usual, that I'm throwing in stuff by first considering whether it's interesting, fun or whatever before worrying about plausibility. Everyone is having fun, because none of us are particularly well versed in comics and super heroes, but we're covering off on all the cliches we know, and it's a high-action, high-paced game where we don't take things as seriously as we generally might.

I can also see clearly that choosing to run the game this way is resulting in different outcomes to my standard processes. People can claim it doesn't matter, but the way the game is developing is not at all the same and it is certainly the case that, in the current game, it absolutely is GM-directed to a fairly high degree.

Overall, I'm finding running a game this way to be less fun for me than my normal methods, and I certainly don't plan to make a habit of it, but there's enough fun for me to keep going, my players seem to be enjoying the change of pace, and I still have a lot of work to do to prep my planned Rolemaster FR Savage Frontier campaign, so this is an easy-to-run time filler until I'm ready.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I will absolutely agree this style of play requires a group where everyone is sufficiently aligned in their expectations and understanding and there there are processes to deal with misunderstandings.

And I'll agree my concerns are very much lessened when you have people who are strongly on the same page on these things.

For those people who haven't been in a position where there is that level of alignment within a group, I can see how they would be leery of the process, and certainly disinclined to use it in their own games.

I don't want to rehash the trust debate, but it seems pretty clear that some of us have found it normal and standard to have groups where this kind of refereeing is able to work without much effort, while others have found such situations to be extreme outliers.

And to be fair, though I do think its at least somewhat of an outlier, its one of those issues that's hard to demonstrate one way or the other.