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

[Micah Sweet]

Thing is, a conflict-neutral or low-no stakes event now may - or may not - have all kinds of consequences down the road. And as you don't know what "down the road" is going to consist of until after you've got there and beyond, I say the default should be to play them out unless the players say not to.

Haggling the merchant down such that with your last few g.p. you can get 6 torches for the usual price of 5 might seem trivial at the time.....until later when having that 6th torch makes all the difference between the party surviving or getting wiped out.

Haggling on a shopping trip in-game is something that has played out more than once at my table. Heck, even Critical Role has done it a few times!

 

[AlViking]

Why don't Conan's enemies kill him when he is captured and imprisoned (in The Scarlet Citadel and The Hour of the Dragon and A Witch Shall Be Born)? Why is Frodo not killed when captured in LotR?

There are reasons. And in FRPGing similar sorts of reason can apply.

I think the above examples show that this needn't be so. Capture is a pretty common trope in fantasy fiction. To me it seems like a design flaw if a FRPG can't handle it as other than a campaign end state.

Those characters were not killed because they exist in novels. I don't want to play a novel. Sometimes capture has been a campaign end state, other times the captives figured out a way to get free that made sense in the fiction. I may put my thumb on the scale to provide opportunities to escape if it makes sense but I never guarantee it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Why don't Conan's enemies kill him when he is captured and imprisoned (in The Scarlet Citadel and The Hour of the Dragon and A Witch Shall Be Born)? Why is Frodo not killed when captured in LotR?

There are reasons. And in FRPGing similar sorts of reason can apply.

I think the above examples show that this needn't be so. Capture is a pretty common trope in fantasy fiction. To me it seems like a design flaw if a FRPG can't handle it as other than a campaign end state.

Without knowing what those reasons are, I can't see the scenario described as logical.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Certainly.

But those are examples of having a cool highlight scene, rather than scrupulously following verisimilitude and scrupulously always avoiding "storytelling".

Yup. There you go. And please note that no one was put in a cage and literally left to die in those scenarios, to my knowledge, unlike the example.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think it's a mistake to look at interesting fiction, and then - when thinking about how a RPG might replicate it - to bring in ideas that assume a basically D&D-esque structure of player and GM moves.

Because if that assumption is made, then - as Hickman worked out over 40 years ago - the answer will always be the way to get interesting fiction is for the GM to use their authority, even if that means overriding the normal heuristics, procedures and mechanics.

Instead, we can look at how to take the most basic feature of RPGing - the GM presents a situation in which certain characters are present, and the players, by "controlling" those characters, act out responses to the presented situation - and arrange it and guide it so that interesting things are apt to happen.

This is where principles like Make the PCs lives not boring and related moves like Provide an opportunity, with or without a cost become salient.

It's not about storytelling. It's about how to frame situations. And it's not undercutting verisimilitude. Who's to say that what happened in the tower of Cirith Ungol, when Frodo was taken prisoner there, is lacking in verisimilitude? Maybe it's just a particularly stark demonstration of a truth about Orcs in particular, and evil in general.

Again Frodo wasn't left to die in a cell. The bad guys were intending to hand him over to Sauron. It is not the same as @EzekielRaiden 's scenario. Specific in the circumstances matter.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The relevant feature for me is, to put it simply, character development. Wa-a-ay more of my characters' development comes through downtime and-or no-stakes events e.g. campfire chats or shopping trips than through high-stakes field adventuring, in large part because in high-stakes field adventuring the top-of-mind thoughts (with extremely rare exceptions) revolve around survival and-or mission completion rather than whether I should pay for my brother to enter mage school or whether I'm truly in love with Bob's character or not, etc.

Yeah. As a DM and a player I love downtime. It's where a lot of RP lives, and its the glue that make all the high stakes crazy adventuring make world sense to me. My favorite parts of Middle-Earth are the Shire and Rivendell, as much as there are a lot more conventionally exciting places in that world.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And you are playing in a non-euro-western campaign then, completely outside of the typical D&D fantasy universe?

Because I'm 99.9% sure you use an extremely euro-western campaign setting. I believe we have specifically talked about that in the past, in fact.


Only if they care about haggling....which means you've already presumed that every merchant haggles. That's begging the question.


Perhaps; perhaps not. If there's only one in town, why would they even bother haggling? You don't have another choice. You have no leverage other than to make no purchase at all. If they're already set up, they're clearly not starving for business.


So then, if the vast majority of the time even the players don't see the point...would it not be better to default to "no" unless the players express interest, which...is literally what I said from the beginning? Like if you already know that the answer is almost always "no", what is the point of presuming yes and getting the "no" you know you'll get?

Currency is far more common and universally used in fantasy than it was in real life prior to the modern age. Often a combination of compensations were used. The ubiquitous gold piece is a gamist idea used for simplicity. I see no reason not to occasionally deviate from the PH equipment list of pricing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And you are playing in a non-euro-western campaign then, completely outside of the typical D&D fantasy universe?

Because I'm 99.9% sure you use an extremely euro-western campaign setting. I believe we have specifically talked about that in the past, in fact.


Only if they care about haggling....which means you've already presumed that every merchant haggles. That's begging the question.


Perhaps; perhaps not. If there's only one in town, why would they even bother haggling? You don't have another choice. You have no leverage other than to make no purchase at all. If they're already set up, they're clearly not starving for business.


So then, if the vast majority of the time even the players don't see the point...would it not be better to default to "no" unless the players express interest, which...is literally what I said from the beginning? Like if you already know that the answer is almost always "no", what is the point of presuming yes and getting the "no" you know you'll get?

My desires to play out "not-interesting-enough-to-Ezekielraiden" events assumes at least some of the players are interested in doing so. If no one is interested and it's not relevant to current circumstances I'm fine with moving forward.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The things you describe are not low-stakes. These are high-stakes. They're not world-ending threats. But they are stakes that matter to the PCs. Those sorts of scenes are fantastically important to the process of play, and at least PbtA games all but tell you "yes, do that thing, that is great and wonderful".

Those things are highlights. Often, they are the most important highlights.

Haggling with a merchant over whether you get five torches or six isn't going to do any of that, it's just going to determine whether you get five torches or six.

If the players want to haggle, then that's what we do. It's within the power of their PCs to do so.

 

[AlViking]

...
Consider: You are climbing a rocky cliff face in order to save your friend. You fail the roll. The GM says, "You reach the top...and find the corpse of your friend, dead long enough that rigor mortis has set in."

Is that not a failure? I don't see how one can parse that as anything but a failure. It's just not a failure in the one narrowly-defined sense of "you fell off the cliff face". It accepts a broader range of results that are still, objectively, failures. The only difference is that the roll is not the singular narrowly-defined condition, "Did you climb this cliff face, yes/no?" It is "Did you succeed at your goal?" The goal was to save the friend--and that failed.
...

It's a failure completely unrelated to the failed climb check. That's the whole issue here. I want a game where if you failed the climb check the only result is that you don't climb the cliff. The only possible negative to that failed check is that you may take damage as a result of falling.

If the friend dies because I didn't get to them in time, it was not caused by us not getting to them in time. They died because there was some kind of ticking clock that the players may or may not have been aware of. The friend was killed by the cultists, succumbed to poison, disease or something else. If the character had successfully climbed the cliff they may have had time to prevent the friend's death but the death was in no way caused by the character's actions or failure to climb the cliff. The attempt to save the friend's life would have been a completely different set of actions and decisions.

This is a pretty fundamental difference to approach and what we want out of the game. I do not run a game that is focused on the narrative, I run a game that is focused on simulation of characters in a fantasy world. Of course I put things in that will be interesting and usually level appropriate because it is still a game. But if there is failure or success the results will follow the fiction of the world, not what moves the story forward or not.