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

[Lanefan]

If any of us took @robertsconley's setting and ran it for our own groups, within a very short time, each of our settings would progress distinctly from each other. Your setting, my setting and the original setting would look very different.

There would almost certainly be different stories being told through those settings but I suspect the settings themselves would be easily recognizable as the same (barring, of course, "after-market mods" such as some PCs blowing up a major city or sinking half a continent).

If the setting had any sort of independent existence, it shouldn't though. After all, it shouldn't really matter who is running it. If we all bought the same car and drove it for the next year, by the end of the year, those three cars would be pretty much identical. Superficial differences only. (Barring, of course, some after market mods )

After-market mods would also include to a specific DM's homebrew alterations, e.g. changing FR such that Neverwinter is the massive city and Waterdeep is a smaller port town. But thousands of campaigns have been run using the FR setting with few-to-no alterations and I'd posit that in nearly all of them the setting is basically the same except with some different specific protagonists doing stuff.

The same would be true if we all took robertsconley's setting and ran it as our own.

So, no, I reject this notion that the setting is somehow separate from the DM of that setting. It can't be.

In the case of a bespoke homebrew setting, maybe; in large part because the inventor of said setting might have much of the info in his-her head rather than written down thus making it very difficult for another DM to run the same setting the same way.

But for published settings? Yes, the setting is largely separate; the DM is just borrowing it.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

In the challenge of outdoor exploration, the challenge of courtly intrigue, the challenge of a heist, the challenge of interpersonal drama, and all sorts of other challenges, a neutral arbiter is always useful.

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?

Rules enforcement. And, in 5e specifically, the making of rulings. The whole 'referee' thing.

 

[SableWyvern]

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.

Yeah, I think it's really impossible to know. I assume your feelings on the matter are based on extensive personal experiences so it's natural that you'll form an opinion that something you rarely see is probably an outlier. But then my extensive experience tells me the exact opposite thing.

My conclusion (as I mentioned earlier) is that the hobby is very diverse and very insular and it's nearly impossible to draw meaningful conclusion about what's genuinely popular or common, beyond in very specific, limited contexts (who is talking about what on EnWorld, how many games on Roll20 are tagged with specific rulesets, etc).

Even that data is often murky -- on the couple of occasions I used Roll20, I didn't load a formal ruleset or display the game publicly, so no one would know what I was using it for. And, obviously, on certain topics on EnWorld opinions are drawn up into camps with contradictory experiences.

 

[Hussar]

I agree with what you are doing, but I disagree that what you are doing is any different than "the referee's logic." In fact, I think it is impossible to be anything but. Perhaps you could say it is: "the internal world logic as the referee* imagines it."

The whole point, IMO, is that you can't have an internal world logic derived from a single person's, or even several people's, viewpoint(s). It is always the referee's* logic.

*when I ay referee I many the one to a handfull of people you develop the game world and adjudicate how it reacts and acts at any given period of game time.

This. This is what I mean, but, phrased much more clearly. Thank you.

 

[AlViking]

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.

For me it depends on the group and campaign. I'm not going to feel bad or feel like my game is "less" because for most of us are just there to tell bad jokes, laugh and just have fun.

Sometimes? Sometimes we get super involved in the roleplaying and it's great. But when we don't? Still a lot of fun.

 

[Hussar]

And if there wasn't a degree of satisfaction and enjoyment to subjective creative vision in play (either from prep via map and key etc and or from moment to moment adjudication & description) we'd all be just playing board games instead. That reactivity is the magic of TTRPG play, even if it can also be the downside if done poorly; but we're talking about well-run games here mainly.

The presence of large communities around specific products on the internet really drives home the subjectivity once something hits the market. Dolmenwood has lots of "what does your X area look like" threads; I've previously mentioned here how vastly different everybody's Doskvol is; even fairly linear adventures have huge differences at the table depending on GM and what they bring in for their players or how they interpret encounters/outcomes.

It's really cool!

Oh, absolutely.

My Forgotten Realms doesn't have a Shadowfell, for example. At least, if I wanted to continue from the material from previous campaigns. It also has a dead Tarrasque. And, it has a returned Zargon.

None of which is remotely like anyone else's Forgotten Realms. Is all the result of player actions. Whether I incorporate any of that in future campaigns is entirely my choice.

But, I'm not going to pretend that it's anything other than my choice to incorporate it. It has nothing to do with the "internal logic" of the setting.

 

[Hussar]

/snip


Is literally what I'm saying is not happening.

So, why are you arguing with me? You agree with me. The setting has no "internal logic" separated from the creator. We agree.

 

[Hussar]

There would almost certainly be different stories being told through those settings but I suspect the settings themselves would be easily recognizable as the same (barring, of course, "after-market mods" such as some PCs blowing up a major city or sinking half a continent).
/snip

Ok, here's the thing.

Two groups start in the exact same space in the setting. Both groups play identical characters. Both groups make identical choices.

According to you, if the setting has internal logic, then both campaigns should end up in exactly the same place because the results of those choices are from the "internal logic" of the setting and not sourced from the DM.

I reject that. The two groups would result in completely diverging campaigns virturally from the first choice because the DM would choose different results based on their personal preferences which have very little to do with the "internal logic" of the setting. @robertsconley admits as much by saying he ran the same campaign (more or less) with different groups. Within very short order, those groups would radically diverge. Even if both groups had made the same decisions initially, the campaigns would still diverge. Because you cannot separate setting from DM. It simply cannot be done.

Two groups go to see the same Lord of the Castle. Both groups use exactly the same approach. One group talks to the Lord of the Castle and forges an alliance. The other group is turned away. Why? Because the DM has decided what is "plausible" in the setting. It is virtually impossible to have groups, even groups that do the exact same thing, to get the same results because you simply cannot remove the DM from the equation.

 

[AlViking]

Ok, here's the thing.

Two groups start in the exact same space in the setting. Both groups play identical characters. Both groups make identical choices.

According to you, if the setting has internal logic, then both campaigns should end up in exactly the same place because the results of those choices are from the "internal logic" of the setting and not sourced from the DM.

I reject that. The two groups would result in completely diverging campaigns virturally from the first choice because the DM would choose different results based on their personal preferences which have very little to do with the "internal logic" of the setting. @robertsconley admits as much by saying he ran the same campaign (more or less) with different groups. Within very short order, those groups would radically diverge. Even if both groups had made the same decisions initially, the campaigns would still diverge. Because you cannot separate setting from DM. It simply cannot be done.

Two groups go to see the same Lord of the Castle. Both groups use exactly the same approach. One group talks to the Lord of the Castle and forges an alliance. The other group is turned away. Why? Because the DM has decided what is "plausible" in the setting. It is virtually impossible to have groups, even groups that do the exact same thing, to get the same results because you simply cannot remove the DM from the equation.

I see no reason to disbelieve robertsconly's experience or that he's being a neutral referee. If two groups made the same choices, same approach, succeeded or failed the same checks then they would have the same results.

That's not what's happening, that's not what happens when I run my games. I don't have Robert's level of experience but I have introduced two groups to the same setting scenario and starting point, hoping they would follow roughly the same path and save me some work. Instead group A got really into a presentation of an NPC and group B pretty much ignored them. Group A chose left when group B went right. The reason group A had went to the metaphorical castle and group B didn't was because group B didn't give a crap about the alliance.

It was all fine for me, a lot of work on who the NPCs were and what factions were there for the first sessions were the same. But pretty quickly the campaigns bore little resemblance to each other because I'm not running a linear campaign. They diverged because the groups chose different directions and made different decisions.

I do not care what choices the players make. I am not guiding them to any destination. If they both approach the lord under the same circumstances they will get the same results. The only consistency is the starting setting, NPCs and factions. After that? Things change.

 

[Maxperson]

I think I was focusing more on the logic aspect and less on the plausibility aspect. People are not logical so you can't plausibly expect them to act logically. That kind of thing.

I think they are logical enough for RPG purposes. At least in my experience DMs that I have played with have been logical enough to come up with plausible outcomes. It's very, very, VERY rare for me to experience a DM decision that is unplausible. It has happened, but only a handful of times in the last 40 years.