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

[DinoInDisguise]

This assumes that the purpose of all RPG is the generation of coherent narrative, which as you say Narrativist system handle structurally. That simply isn't the case. I don't know how to explain that more clearly.

I think this is a misunderstanding here. Even in games that aren’t focused on coherent narrative, the core point still applies. This is because pacing matters in any playstyle.

Just because a game isn’t telling a structured story doesn’t mean it’s doing nothing. There’s still player engagement, tension, momentum; and those all benefit from good pacing.

So even in your example, every roll should have meaning. Rolls that do nothing, are, in my opinion, wasting time. The presence of a narrative is kind of irrelevant to the larger principle, good pacing matters.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's not a perspective I hold with, as I've never see a player embark upon an intentless process. To recycle a past observation, here's a sequence we never see

Player: I want to climb the wall​

DM: Okay, roll Strength (Athletics)​

Player: 14+5 that's 19​

DM: That's some real nice climbing you are doing there​

Player: So I've reached the top of the wall?​

DM: No, no, you're just climbing really nicely (cares only about the outcome of the process)​

Player: ... (expected to resolve their intent: reaching the top of the wall)​

One might moot that intent were limited to "overcome the presented obstacle"... I'll need to reflect on that before I can say whether it seems right to me.

First of all, MANY GMs would say that you're halfway up the wall! Heck, 3e very certainly regulates the distance covered by a climbing action. Even 4e does so in combat.

But beyond that, I climb the wall, is just a mechanical action, it says nothing about intent. I'd also point out that PbtA like DW don't require declaration of intent either, "I climb the wall" is perfectly cromulent play. However, the framing of conflict in scene, something 5e totally lacks, is what imbues such action declarations with weight in DW.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think this is a misunderstanding here. Even in games that aren’t focused on coherent narrative, the core point still applies. This is because pacing matters in any playstyle.

Just because a game isn’t telling a structured story doesn’t mean it’s doing nothing. There’s still player engagement, tension, momentum; and those all benefit from good pacing.

So even in your example, every roll should have meaning. Rolls that do nothing, are, in my opinion, wasting time. The presence of a narrative is kind of irrelevant to the larger principle, good pacing matters.

My apologies then. You appeared to suggest narrative as the core throughput of all RPG play, and I very much disagree with that.

 

[AlViking]

First of all, MANY GMs would say that you're halfway up the wall! Heck, 3e very certainly regulates the distance covered by a climbing action. Even 4e does so in combat.

But beyond that, I climb the wall, is just a mechanical action, it says nothing about intent. I'd also point out that PbtA like DW don't require declaration of intent either, "I climb the wall" is perfectly cromulent play. However, the framing of conflict in scene, something 5e totally lacks, is what imbues such action declarations with weight in DW.

But that just means we have different ways of expressing goals of the game and likely different goals. If I'm climbing a significantly tall cliff I may need more than one roll but that just means I'm closer to achieving my goal of getting to the top of the cliff. My ultimate goal is to achieve something else - retrieve the golden eagle egg for the noble so he can replace his prize bird or whatever.

You can't really compare the two directly that doesn't mean that in D&D people are rolling dice for no reason. They're just rolling them for different reasons. But rolling dice should always be a step in moving forward, or at least not moving backwards.

 

[Lanefan]

To me, or at least how I've normally seen the term used (with the enormous caveat of my normal doesn't match anyone else's), "players drive the direction" is a bit too broad. It basically just divides games into 2 categories, sandbox and module/storypath (where the game is driven by the scripted plot). And I think there are plenty of games that are neither storypath nor sandbox.

IME a long-term campaign tends to end up being some of both: the players' decisions in a sandbox might lead them into a several-adventure storypath, after which they're back out in the sandbox and can go and-or do whatever.

My current campaign is in theory a sandbox. in practice, however, the proactivity of the players over the years has ranged from decent to almost nonexistent, thus I've ended up directing things somewhat more than I'd really like to. That said, within the campaign there's been at least five embedded hard-linked series of adventures (i.e. storypaths) each at least four adventures long.

An old-school example of what I mean would be a DM embedding the A-series of modules into a bigger campaign.

To me, a sandbox implies a certain amount of pre-game encounter planning and location frame building. You need at least a loose matrix of a map with some "encounters" that are keyed to the map matrix and something to generate random encounters. If it doesn't have at least some kind of loose geographic framework, I would struggle to classify it as a sandbox.

Indeed, geographic framework is vital...and not just to a sandbox but to any campaign where the setting is to be at all relevant.

 

[Pedantic]

It's not a perspective I hold with, as I've never see a player embark upon an intentless process. To recycle a past observation, here's a sequence we never see

Player: I want to climb the wall​

DM: Okay, roll Strength (Athletics)​

Player: 14+5 that's 19​

DM: That's some real nice climbing you are doing there​

Player: So I've reached the top of the wall?​

DM: No, no, you're just climbing really nicely (cares only about the outcome of the process)​

Player: ... (expected to resolve their intent: reaching the top of the wall)​

Intent is expressed through action declaration; the process outputs a climb speed, which a player uses to change the situation somehow. The roll can only tell you about the results of a fixed process, the interaction of that process and the situation determines if intent is realized. The mistake is tying intent to a single act of resolution. Players are putting forward strategies to overcome obstacles, pursuing lines of play that require multiple steps to succeed.

One might moot that intent were limited to "overcome the presented obstacle"... I'll need to reflect on that before I can say whether it seems right to me.

This can also break down the other way, as you point out here. If you tie obstacles to specific resolution rolls, then you limit the space for players to influence the game state toward the result they want. A roll to overcome a given cliff, instead of a will to output a fixed climbing ability that can turn be leverage against the cliff lead to incomparable gameplay.

 

[Lanefan]

Then I'd disagree. I don't use maps ...

Question: if you don't use maps then how do the players know or remember what is where in relation to what? For example, is Karnos (city) north or west of Torcha (another city), what type of terrain lies between them, and how long does it likely take to get from one to the other?

Or do the players just draw their own maps from your descriptions?

 

[robertsconley]

I think this is a misunderstanding here. Even in games that aren’t focused on coherent narrative, the core point still applies. This is because pacing matters in any playstyle.

Yes, pacing matters in every play style, but that’s not the issue here. What matters is how pacing is handled, and that’s one of several elements that distinguishes different play styles in the first place.

So even in your example, every roll should have meaning. Rolls that do nothing, are, in my opinion, wasting time. The presence of a narrative is kind of irrelevant to the larger principle, good pacing mattmatter

Likewise, saying “every roll should have meaning” is too broad a statement. It flattens the nuance of how @Micah Sweet uses rolls in his campaign, or how I use them in my Living World Sandbox. Like pacing, the purpose and context of rolling the dice vary between styles. I'm not just talking about mechanical procedure, but about what function a roll serves in the structure of play.

 

[Lanefan]

The GM, who is presumably using a system that has nonhuman options, should have figured out how they work in the setting in the first place. You can have a faux Ancient Greece setting and still have nonhumans integrated in it.p (the faux-Spartans were actually elves or orcs or whatever, etc). If you were going for historical Ancient Greece, you should have been clearer on the no nonhumans, no magic, etc. up front.

Or I just let them sink or swim as oddities in a strange land.

My current campaign started exactly this way, in faux-ancient Greece, only I ruled their first characters had to be Human; other species would (and very quickly did, even during their first adventure) become available once they got out of the core civilized lands.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I think this is a misunderstanding here. Even in games that aren’t focused on coherent narrative, the core point still applies. This is because pacing matters in any playstyle.

I think this is a very good point and it gets at an issue I had with a D&D adjacent game, PF2. In PF2, you can make a Medicine roll which takes 10 minutes, to heal damage. You can also make a Crafting roll, which takes 10 minutes, to repair damage to your shield. In both cases, you can spam the rolls until you heal/repair your gear completely. Even on a critical failure, you do minor damage that can be fixed by rolling again.

There are game structures that disincentivize hand waving the rolls (specific feats that allow you to « take 10 » on the roll and feats that reduce the cooldown on the roll).

The effect is that unless there is a pressing reason NOT to take the time to heal up between fights (non-existent in the modules I’ve seen), after ever fight pacing grinds to a halt while the PC trained in Medicine rolls to heal up all the characters and PCs roll to repair their equipment.

It’s rolls without stakes which serves only to slow down the game with busywork.