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

[AlViking]

I think the way this is to be interpreted is very different in the two playstyles though. In the narativistic context something new should be introduced. The common result of failing in trad is however often the oposite - a posibility that was once there is now no longer pressent. Both are consequences that changes the situation. However one is a complication while the other is in one way a "simplification". The complication is of course much more "engaging" and "interesting". But the removal of the obvious options through failures could foster more creative problem solving.

Take opening a door trough lockpicking. The trad way would be failure - you recognize this lock is beyond your abilities. This is a consequence, as you just learned something new about the situation - the situation has changed, and the pacing are still moving forward. The problem is still the same, but less desireable options like noisy breaking down the door, trying to find a way around, knocking on the door hoping anyone on the other side gets curious and opens it, or maybe expend a spell slot to put the door on fire are suddently things that should be considered more carefully.

In a narativistic game a failure is generally introducing some new complications - the classic being guards rounding the corner while lockpicking. This also causes the situation to change. However suddently the problem isn't the door but the guards. The entire focus of the scene has shifted. This is definitely more dramatic, but much more conductive to fun reactivity than contemplative proaction.

So again this might seem like a common principle, but claiming it is just "codified" in PbtA and similar games is missing the point. Those games codifies it, but in a way that is very spesific to the kind of experience they seek to produce.

This is why I think discussing what works in a narrative game so often doesn't really apply to games like D&D. When I'm GMing, I'm doing my best to keep the game moving along but my primary priority is a loose simulation of a fantasy world that the characters interact with. If they try to open a door and they can't it can have negative consequences if they're being chased by a Balrog or make noise that alerts enemies while doing so. But there's not automatically going to be any impact if it's just a door they can't open and they can continue moving on to the next door. Lack of progress doesn't automatically mean failure with complication, it just means the option you tried didn't work.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Well, there are a couple of ways to handle that that still matter:

1. You can, of course, simply assume the healing is done as long as there's time. Though there's some randomness in process because there's a limited resource involved (Recoveries, and possibly potions that enhance the recoveries) that's the tact 13th Age takes, and you could set a flat value on that if you didn't want to use die rolls and it'd still work.

2. The die rolls may be pass-or-fail processes where if you don't succeed, you have to use resources you otherwise wouldn't or you simply have to carry on with the injury still present until a much longer time frame is available to heal (a fair number of games that use less abstract damage systems than is typical in the D&D sphere take this tact).

In neither of these cases would I call it "busywork" though it may have other consequences that may not be desirable to some.

Edit: its to be noted that the assumption buried in those rolls in PF2e is that at least some of the time, that time consumption might matter; how often that's actually applied within APs and the like is a different story.

 

[pemerton]

the idea that any GM, in any system, would ask for a roll that doesn't move the narrative forward feels off. One of the GM’s most important responsibilities is pacing. Calling for rolls that don’t affect the story is, in my view, an unforced error. It wastes time and often creates drag on the momentum of play. It's textbook poor pacing.

Another recent one that's been mentioned (though maybe in slightly different terms) is "the result of a roll should never be 'nothing happens'". I very much agree with this... keep things active and moving. Let things develop rather than staying the same. Otherwise, don't pick up the dice.

Classic dungeon-crawling D&D allows for rolls that don't "move the narrative forward". For instance, the players are allowed to declare that their PCs look for secret doors, or look for traps; those declared actions are often resolved by rolling dice; and the answer is very commonly "You don't find anything" or "Nothing happens".

It can produce a degree of tedium or drag in play, but that's something that people who have signed on for that game have signed up for.

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.

<snip>

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.

Classic D&D tries to solve this issue by either flat-out prohibiting re-rolls, or by putting a time-cost on rolls (mostly via wandering monster checks).

These limits break down, as play approaches change, for at least two reasons: the prohibition of re-tries seems "unrealistic", and so gets dropped; the fictional context moves out of the dungeon, and so wandering monster checks as the "clock" also seem unrealistic. In published versions of D&D, 4e was the first version to set out to systematically solve this problem.

I mean, I don't think it's particularly controversial to point out that for D&D, or at least traditional D&D (3e and before), the point of a roll was to determine the outcome of a process, not the realization of an intent.

I think the point of rolls in post-DL AD&D, and in 3E D&D, is often quite unclear. Rolls to hit, combined with rolls to damage, tend to resolve a (fairly narrow) intent - to defeat the opponent by fighting them. Some 3E rolls effectively reframe scenes - "You see an empty room." "I roll Perception." <gets a high result> "OK, you see a room containing <xyz>"; or, "You meet some angry people." "I roll Diplomacy." <gets a high result> "OK, the people you've met are friendly now."

And some rolls just seem to change the colour but little else: "You're in a room." "I climb the walls and hang from the ceiling." <rolls high> "OK, you're in a room hanging from the ceiling."

4e D&D was pretty clear about the point of rolls, but that generated a lot of controversy!

In 2014 in the DMG with the rule* not to roll unless there are consequences, which was brought into the PHB in 2024.

This was discussed way up thread. As I posted then, it is a rule for GM-centred play: the GM decides whether or not a declared action is apt to have consequences, and on that basis calls for a roll, or doesn't.

An alternative approach is to use a different heuristic for determining whether or not to call for a roll (eg the AW heuristic of "if you do it, you do it" applied to well-defined player-side "moves"; or the DitV/Burning Wheel heuristic of looking to stakes/intent to determine whether to roll the dice or say "yes"). Then, when a roll is called for, that determines that there will be consequences.

 

[pemerton]

in many respects PbtA games are trying to represent cinematic fiction

I don't think there's much useful to be said about PbtA games as a whole. But I don't think this is very accurate about Apocalypse World, unless by "cinematic fiction" we simply mean "fiction where interesting and emotionally resonant things happen frequently to the protagonists".

 

[zakael19]

Is there a point to applying a term to my preferences that is clearly taken by many people, including the OP, as a negative? For all intents and purposes that's just a put down. Is it a problem for you that I have a long gaming history, or that dramatic/cinematic play is not my top priority?

This is just a long-winded way to tell me to "get with the times".

No, it's because you keep dropping crappy little one liners like digs or "crapposting" throughout this thread. Like, you show up each day to go "whoa my god what you just posted sounds like hell on earth for what I want out of D&D, away with you!"

Do I think that everybody should be playing Dungeon World or something? Heck no. But yes, there's absolutely plenty to learn about what it's clear the vast majority of people who arent just here for casual beer&pretzels lighthearted play want out of their games from narrativist stuff. I know I said this like (my god) 800 pages ago, but when I ran 5e.TOV for a group with a very "story now" collaborative bent, I had one of the players flat out go "wow, this is the first time like I've actually felt the DM meant it when they said that they wanted to do collaborative story telling and how you run things is now my litmus test."

Out of the >20 different players I've run games for over the last year (sure, not a statistical sample size but getting there), all have been here for a story of some sort. All have taken to more "ask questions and build on answers" style play, regardless of game. All have been delighted with backstories being brought in, and collaboration around what happens next. Not all have been ready to play a PBTA, or engage in full no-myth world building, but elements from that sort of play? Absolutely.

Also, only 1 has been >45.

 

[zakael19]

Classic dungeon-crawling D&D allows for rolls that don't "move the narrative forward". For instance, the players are allowed to declare that their PCs look for secret doors, or look for traps; those declared actions are often resolved by rolling dice; and the answer is very commonly "You don't find anything" or "Nothing happens".

It can produce a degree of tedium or drag in play, but that's something that people who have signed on for that game have signed up for.

Most of this play now falls under the OSR umbrella, and has its own distinct play culture and expectations that you're absolutely signing up for. Heck, it generally stresses to avoid rolling outside combat as much as possible!

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't think there's much useful to be said about PbtA games as a whole. But I don't think this is very accurate about Apocalypse World, unless by "cinematic fiction" we simply mean "fiction where interesting and emotionally resonant things happen frequently to the protagonists".

I kind of do think of that as "cinematic" when it happens frequently--the word "frequently" is important here. "Cinematic" is relevant because you can have plenty of space in long-form fiction where you're just getting bits of slice-of-life or development that isn't all that dramatic in effect, but sets up more important events, where as in much cinema that's a luxury good you cannot afford (in the exceptions you only really need one or two events and the rest of the work is about characters reacting to it).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Most of this play now falls under the OSR umbrella, and has its own distinct play culture and expectations that you're absolutely signing up for. Heck, it generally stresses to avoid rolling outside combat as much as possible!

Of course part of that is the hostility in much of the OSR to mechanics substituting for player decision-making, but there's nothing stops a game from having mechanical process do some of that lifting; the fact it doesn't in most of the OSR is a quirk of how they've decided to define "skilled play".

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't think there's much useful to be said about PbtA games as a whole. But I don't think this is very accurate about Apocalypse World, unless by "cinematic fiction" we simply mean "fiction where interesting and emotionally resonant things happen frequently to the protagonists".

What else would you mean by cinematic fiction?

 

[Micah Sweet]

No, it's because you keep dropping crappy little one liners like digs or "crapposting" throughout this thread. Like, you show up each day to go "whoa my god what you just posted sounds like hell on earth for what I want out of D&D, away with you!"

Do I think that everybody should be playing Dungeon World or something? Heck no. But yes, there's absolutely plenty to learn about what it's clear the vast majority of people who arent just here for casual beer&pretzels lighthearted play want out of their games from narrativist stuff. I know I said this like (my god) 800 pages ago, but when I ran 5e.TOV for a group with a very "story now" collaborative bent, I had one of the players flat out go "wow, this is the first time like I've actually felt the DM meant it when they said that they wanted to do collaborative story telling and how you run things is now my litmus test."

Out of the >20 different players I've run games for over the last year (sure, not a statistical sample size but getting there), all have been here for a story of some sort. All have taken to more "ask questions and build on answers" style play, regardless of game. All have been delighted with backstories being brought in, and collaboration around what happens next. Not all have been ready to play a PBTA, or engage in full no-myth world building, but elements from that sort of play? Absolutely.

Also, only 1 has been >45.

I have never told any group.of players that I was offering a "collaborative story-telling experience", and I don't know why I would. That is what some gaming is about, and I honestly don't care how much.