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

[Micah Sweet]

How?

I am being 100% sincere here.

If you go through all the complex motions of the player insisting they want six torches instead of five, whether or not they get those torches, how has that actually changed anything about them?

As I already said, "high-stakes" things are high-stakes to the character, which may or may not have any relationship to ~world-shaking events~ or whatever. Those things absolutely, 100% matter.

But doing a shopping trip, the thing everyone keeps harping on as so vitally important that we MUST play through it to the hilt every single time unless the players specifically reject doing so? How is that not leaving the characters "entirely unchanged"? They haven't learned anything (except, perhaps, whether a certain merchant is pliable or not), they haven't grown, they haven't developed, they haven't had their beliefs challenged or reinforced or brought to light, they haven't discovered something new about themselves, they haven't found new love or lost something they cared about or raged at the heavens.

They've tried to get six torches for a silver piece instead of five. That's it. That's literally it. And yet the player is expected to do that at the general goods store, and do it again at the blacksmith, and again at the tailor, and again at the stables, ad nauseam until every single purchase they've felt like making is concluded.

Events have occurred in the fiction. Roleplaying has happened in this roleplaying game. Maybe a beloved shopkeeper NPC is introduced. Who knows? The point is that the players are playing this out because they want to, and I have no right (and no desire, really) to make them stop. I'm sorry if that's not exciting enough for you personally, but you don't sit at my metaphorical table.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You can't see why anyone would value honesty and owning up to mistakes, then fixing them as a group, over trying to hide them for the sake of pretending the world is real?

You've tried to cast traditional GM powers as a path to abuse and claiming infallibility, but we've been telling you for ages that's not how it works.

Indeed. Mistakes happen. When I notice them or when they are pointed out to me I do my best to correct them. Because I try not to a jerk.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yes, and as such I will never do it.

Retcons are to me the worst thing a DM can ever do, due to the consequent invalidation of play that has already happened which IMO should be sacrosanct, and as such I go to great - even extreme - lengths to ensure I never put myself in the position of having to retcon anything.

And sure, once in a while I'll mess up and put them in way over their heads...but even then it's on them to find a way out of it and IME they always do, even if a few characters die in the process.

And that's fine too, so long as the players know this sort of thing can happen going in. Not my style, but to each their own.

 

[Maxperson]

Except that even in that city, there is zero chance that the PC's are going to meet that CR 20+ stuff because the DM will signpost it so clearly. Granted, we might have players that are that deliberately suicidal, but, generally speaking, no they aren't. So, even if that stuff exists in your city, it won't see play until such time as the PC's are capable of handling it.

Your worlds are exactly like WoW worlds. That's the consequence of playing in a leveled system. There's no avoiding it.

You don't get to tell us how we get to run our games, man. We are telling you that you can run into CR 20 stuff. Remember that running and/or non-combat options are available in games. If the only thing that could happen would be combat, then sure, we would have to telegraph powerful things.

And wandering monsters aren't telegraphed encounters in any case. They are monsters that wander into you(often while you are camped), and can be waaaaay outside your level range.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Is it acceptable for the GM to forbid some outcomes and permit other outcomes, because the forbidden outcomes would be bad for the campaign in some way (e.g., "the campaign just ends in a really dull and disappointing way"), while the permitted outcomes would avoid whatever is bad about the bad outcomes?


Nope! Because, as I have now told you at least three times, "fail forward" DOESN'T MEAN YOU SUCCEED.

Do I need to put it in thousand-foot-tall neon letters? I'm getting extremely frustrated here, because I know I've said this to you several times over, and you keep saying stuff like this.


Proper application of fail forward should always have failure in the outcome. Period.


Only if you define failure as that one circumstance and nothing else ever, forever. That's the problem here. You are rigidly defining one and only one consequence as what "failure" means, and excluding any other possibility that could still be failure, but not that SPECIFIC failure.


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 worth noting here, Dungeon World (which is my PbtA game of experience; I know most others work mostly the same) does not have a "Climb" roll. If a character tries to climb a sheer cliff face, that would be a Defy Danger roll. You are acting despite an imminent threat. In this case, you'd be defying the danger of the wall, in order to do something. What is that something? That is where the failure lies. If you roll 6-or-less total on your check (2d6+MOD), then you failed. In this case, the danger of the cliff overpowered you; sure, you got to the top, but the danger meant you could not reach your goal, namely, saving your friend's life. Now they're dead, and that isn't going to just go away. Maybe you can fix it, maybe you can't. That's why we play to find out what happens.


Well, I rolled and you got a 2 on the d20. (I actually did roll, in the roller bot I use for my Dungeon World game; I can get a screenshot if you care. Roll was made at 12:52 AM Pacific time, with the description "DC 16 Illusion" for fluff. I gave you a +2 modifier for presumed Wisdom bonus.) So I'm afraid you can't disbelieve this illusion!

More seriously, I've made the argument above.


Well then, @SableWyvern, I think I've made my point. There is in fact at least one person in this thread who would do that, if time allowed. Likewise, the above example of the GM admitting a mistake and correcting it is something Lanefan would never do.

Then fail-forward doesn't work in many traditional games where rolls often determine much more specific things than in Dungeon World. Your definition of failure works best if the roll is much more general than is usually the case in, for example, D&D.

 

[Maxperson]

Before the first expansion, the human city in WoW - Stormwind - reachable at level 1, contained a black dragon and their minions that could potentially appear and kill any low level character in the castle at the time. Higher level elites than most mobs prowled the Silverpine woods in the Sons of Aragul. Multiple zones had sub-zones containing higher level or elite enemies. Giants in Aszhara or the entrance to Uldam in Tanaris. What you describe is literally how WoW was designed at launch.

-edit and this should really come as a surprise to no-one, as WoW like Everquest before it derived a lot of it's design principles from fairly old-school D&D.

Not really. I played WoW in vanilla. You generally saw the elites and other high level things way in advance of aggroing them and learned very quickly to just hit all the small stuff in your area. Old school D&D wasn't like that. You didn't get to always or even mostly, know how powerful something was. I once had a 5th level PC in 2e pick a fight with a vampire in a tavern, because he didn't know it was a vampire and just wanted to blow off some steam. It didn't go well.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What rule stops a secret admirer knowing the PC is imprisoned? Especially in a world of gods and magic.

Are you saying that you can decide that anything is plausible because the setting has gods and magic? That's hardly a free pass to make up anything you want in my game, particularly at the table in response to an active play situation.

 

[Micah Sweet]

No, it isn't.

It is literally the most important thing.

The same goes for all your arguments about how important it is that characters roleplay with one another even when their lives aren't in danger. Because why you do things is, quite literally, the most important thing. If motive didn't matter, we wouldn't bother with all this fiction nonsense. We'd play the much more efficient Statistics & Spreadsheets. Like, the very reason you want to spend so much time on those things is because they reveal why characters do the things they do!

Important to the game. Not important to the die roll.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But this then means there is no such thing as "traditional GM" stuff.

There's just what SableWyvern does, what Lanefan does, what Micah does, etc.

If you're going to say there is a style, then people who speak up in defense of that style should be expected to...y'know...defend that style and be questioned when they do things that conflict with how that style has been defined, particularly when they agree to that definition, as has happened many, many times over in this thread.

Like at this point this reads to me as "there is no style, there is no pattern, there is nothing at all, except what individual GMs decide to do or not do". At which point no discussion is possible, because I'm not interested in discussing the individual techniques of a dozen different GMs that have no relationship whatsoever to one another.

I try to be very careful that what I say about my play is about my play. I may agree with other posters on some things, especially in a broad fashion, but not everything. Are you always in lockstep with the other Narrativist fans?

 

[pemerton]

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.

Your post shifts between talking about imaginary causation in the fiction, and the exercise of authorial power in the real world.

The fact that you assume that, in a RPG, it would have to be the GM who "puts their thumb on the scale", is why your approach to RPGing seems to me to be GM-centric.

Sometimes failing to light the candle means that you get eaten by the grue. But that's because the grue is afraid of light and was stalking you, not because you couldn't light the candle.

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.

<snip>

I run a game that is focused on simulation of characters in a fantasy world.

These posts provide more illustration of why, to me, your approach to RPGing seems very GM-centric.

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

REH's Conan is supposed to be one of the principal inspirations for D&D, and FRPGing more generally. If you are saying that it would be "illogical" for FRPGing to permit Conan-esque things to happen, you've completely lost me.

Are you saying that you can decide that anything is plausible because the setting has gods and magic? That's hardly a free pass to make up anything you want in my game, particularly at the table in response to an active play situation.

I'm wondering what rule would make it impossible - in a world of gods and magic - that a secret admirer would not be able to know that a person is imprisoned, and assist them?