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

[zakael19]

I don't disagree. One of my annoyances with the BitD community is the amount of fans who tell new players - particularly those coming from D&D5e - that they need to "unlearn bad habits". Habits and techniques picked up from playing D&D may not necessarily be conducive to running/playing BitD, but that doesn't necessarily make them bad.

To be fair, the book itself points out a set of "GM Bad Habits" to watch out for that while not explicitly so, are more or less "hey, you may be used to doing the following things in other games, dont do them here." Some of those are bad habits for all games arguably!

You can also have the situation where the scope of the mechanics is such that how something is likely to be resolved is usually pretty clear going into it; though not a big fan, most PbtA games are like this (I find them overly schematic for my tastes, but you shouldn't see a lot of out-of-context mechanical application in the ones I've looked over. At most a player may expect one Move when the GM seems to think its clearly another one).

Right, there's implicit limits on the GM in a lot of these systems based on who gets "say." Eg: In Blades in the Dark, the GM cannot call for a specific action roll to be used, they state the fictional position and their gauge of effect from the player's stated action to use as the jumping off point for mechanics. Players are likewise admonished to "not be a weasel" and pick an action which matches the fictional movement they're doing. In a PBTA, generally "to do it, do it" in that if a player says their character is "squaring up to Drogan, getting up all in his space and asking 'so whatcha gonna do about it?'" they're doing the move of go aggro on someone and the GM should confirm that just to make sure the fiction is clear but it's the player doing the thing fictionally that has the mechanical trigger.

There's some exceptions ("Check moves," resistance rolls, etc), but these player-facing mechanics with delimited outcomes based on roll limit the GM's management of play as well as binding their response (eg: if the stakes are an outcome and they roll a full success, they get the outcome).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Then how is it that so many people appear to play this way? Your IMO hyperbolic concerns seem to assume a massive player underclass mercilessly tyraniized by the trust-weilding GM elite.

Are you asserting there aren't dramatically more players than DMs--such that there isn't a shortage?

Are you asserting that nearly all players always have a long, established history with their players before a campaign begins? (If so, how can that established history have occurred when they're starting their first campaign???)

Are you asserting that trust never needs to be built nor maintained? Because that's what people have been telling me they haven't been asserting for a while now, and it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for an assertion that was apparently 100% one direction for the thread up to this point to suddenly reverse.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That is your objective. It is not ours. I don't want a setting that functions like a machine. I want a human managing the setting because I think that creates the best reactive environment for players. Part of the issue here is we just have entirely different expectations

And yet you keep saying you want the setting "independent". That you want a "physics" engine or the like. That you want an "objective" world. Etc., etc., etc.

You can't have your cake and eat it too, here.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think we're going to need a citation on that one.

Have you not seen the NUMEROUS times people refer to an "objective" world, to being forced by the setting to make a decision, to having "realism" limit their actions (but as soon as this is questioned, we see that "realism" is barely even a limitation at all)?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Right, I'm with you here in that I draw a hard line between content and action resolution. I want plenty of guidance from a game on what I should put in the fictional setting, and absolute (and player facing) clarity on what happens when those elements interact. The emergence should come from the interaction of created elements with PC elements invoking different parts of a broad resolution system.

Or to be more specific, I don't particularly care if the jumping rules are a good model of how jumping works in the real world, but I do care that they will output a parsable resolution for every attempted jump. To that end, I suppose I would put "can be achieved with function calls to the resolution systems" as a constraint on par with plausibility on GM content determinations.

I'm not completely blase about how well or poorly a physical mechanic seems to match to my understanding of how things would probably work out here in the world (barring genre or setting conventions baked in that change that), but as I said, I can always tweak that with houserules; I'd rather have a consistent (but counterfactual) resolution system than play guessing games with a GM's judgment most of the time (there are a couple posters on here who seem like they lean enough into being interactive players about resolution its probably a reasonable replacement, but I've got no reason to believe most GMs roll like that and the fixation on speed a lot of them have makes me think quite the contrary).

 

[zakael19]

Are you asserting there aren't dramatically more players than DMs--such that there isn't a shortage?

Are you asserting that nearly all players always have a long, established history with their players before a campaign begins? (If so, how can that established history have occurred when they're starting their first campaign???)

Are you asserting that trust never needs to be built nor maintained? Because that's what people have been telling me they haven't been asserting for a while now, and it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for an assertion that was apparently 100% one direction for the thread up to this point to suddenly reverse.

I think Micah has never been on Reddit . I remember a group of new players I took on had only done a little one shot before, the GM for that told them that they lit the field where they were camped on fire because nobody explicitly said they'd put the fire out (even though the party included a Barbarian with Survival proficiency; or that even novice adventurers wouldn't be that dumb).

I've GMed for people who just due to the cultural expectations much less play expected all NPCs to be secretly waiting to betray them.

I've had people turtle up and horde their resources because they expected to be dropped into unwinnable combat at a moment's notice.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've gone to significant effort to explain this for you on a couple of occasions, but you ignore those responses so you can rant at other posters and complain to them that no one will answer you.

I genuinely have not seen a post from you that constituted any kind of answer, as I understand "an answer" to be.

I am not being flippant. I am not being disingenuous. I have not seen one single thing.

Perhaps I am mistaken. The thread has, at times, moved at lightning speed and sometimes I log in to 40+ notifications, meaning even if I try I may not see all of them. If I have missed a reply from you that contains something you consider a substantive answer, I truly apologize and would love to see it so I can respond to it.

But from where I'm sitting, I haven't seen one single thing about actually building or maintaining trust. It is consistently "why don't you just TRUST your DM???" or the fundamentally ad hominem insults like "wow it must really suck to be unable to trust people". (Yet another underhanded rhetorical trick, but does it get called out by those who favor this style? Even once?)

This may or may not be the case, but one thing seems abundantly clear. This style is absolutely not for @EzekielRaiden. I suspect that if you simply accept this, rather than demanding that people explain to you what they are going to do to make you feel more comfortable at their table (where you're not even a participant), and accusing them of being exclusionary if you're not satisfied with their answers, you'll be a lot less stressed about this conversation.

Yet again, making it personal instead of actually participating in the discussion or engaging in any way.

"It works for us, so you're wrong and bad and emotional" isn't an argument. It's a rejection of discussion, with an insult for spice.

 

[Faolyn]

PbtA games' GM Principles seem to me to be a explicit codification of what has generally been considered GM best practices. They're like the GMing equivalent of painting by numbers - that's not meant to be disparaging; paint by numbers kits exist for reason. People often think that creative endeavours are born of talent, but in actuality they require skill, honed and developed through practice. Talent as an innate quality certainly helps, but it only acts as a baseline for learned skills, not a ceiling. Codification allows for learning and teaching creative skills and once a person has mastered the fundamentals, they can push the bounds through experimentation, like jazz.

And of course, the irony is that those GM best practices that PbtA games codify as rules were cultivated through practice by old guard GMs like @robertsconley

Pretty much yup. I've been GMing a while, but even then seeing them codified helped me quite a bit.

 

[JConstantine]

To be fair, the book itself points out a set of "GM Bad Habits" to watch out for that while not explicitly so, are more or less "hey, you may be used to doing the following things in other games, dont do them here." Some of those are bad habits for all games arguably!

It does. And I'd agree a few of them to apply across the board, but there's some I chafe at. Even Harper himself fails to abide them in the actual plays he ran.

 

[zakael19]

It does. And I'd agree a few of them to apply across the board, but there's some I chafe at. Even Harper himself fails to abide them in the actual plays he ran.

Interesting, which ones? The only one I can see is the suggesting a specific action - he explicitly builds that into the Deep Cuts Threat Roll (but I think that’s more Weasel enforcement since it’s still up to the player to pick).