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

[Lanefan]

It's a D&D thread that wasn't discussing a specific technical detail like how to build the best underwater basket weaver but just general D&D philosophy. It was pretty inevitable that the arguments about how narrative games are the new hot thing would start up. Again, to be clear, if you like the new thing that's cool. I'll likely never be a fan of Vaporwave* But I also don't limit my listening to music produced when I was in high school and I don't call music produced after that garbage, I've listened to a bit here and there I just don't care for it. But if you enjoy Seapunk? Go for it.

On the other hand if I'm not going to go on a thread dedicated to The Cure** and start talking about how amazing Taylor Swift is and "joke" about how only conservative geriatrics want to listen to music from a band from the 80s.

* The Sound of Tomorrow: 15 Innovative Music Genres To Know
** The best new music of 2024 by genre. Not that I'm really a fan of The Cure, it just came up on the same search and seemed appropriate.

Synthwave is great background music to play during the game sessions.

 

[Lanefan]

I had it happen to me, too… plenty of times. Mostly years ago when all the play I was taking part in would be called “trad”.

I think it’s far more likely or common in location based scenarios. The classic example is the secret door that’s missed which prevents the group from actually completing the “adventure”… they don’t find the treasure or the monster they were sent to slay or what have you.

I think there was more of a predisposition back then to approach each module as a distinct unit of play, and you wouldn’t proceed to the next one until you’d “beaten” the current one.

And yet even then sometimes the module beat you. Could be because you missed something vital, could be because you got in over your heads and-or got unlucky on some rolls, could be because you brought the wrong team for the job, or whatever.

Also, in past times when a party has missed something major in a module (e.g. an entire level or two) I've found it fairly easy to have the place become active again before long due to this, and eventually have some NPCs complain to the party "We thought you cleaned that place out; obviously you didn't!". Result: the PCs end up going back there to finish, meaning I-as-DM get two adventures for the price of one.

These days such a scenario is more likely to be part of a sandbox where the dissatisfaction of failing to “complete” the adventure is just something to deal with, and the players are expected to move on to something else.

Sounds fine to me. The characters aren't perfect and thus would be highly unlikely in the long run to end up with a perfect mission-completion record. And if they think they missed somethng or it later somehow becomes clear that they did, they can always go back and revisit that adventure.

Either way, it’s a recipe for dissatisfaction and, in my opinion, an example of poor design.

Not sure these statements are at all universal.

 

[Lanefan]

That's a huge assumption. It's incredibly easy to come up with something interesting that is 100% in the fiction. Example: they're in an area where there are monsters or guards. They take too long to do something and those monsters or guards (or someone who then alerts the monsters or guards) find them. Example: They get through the lock, but the lockpicks break.

How do either of those feel contrived or nonsensical?

In isolation, they make perfect sense.

When it happens every time a roll is failed, however, it quickly starts looking contrived; because it is.

The party is actively going into dangerous situations looking for trouble and treasure; it's an adventure game, not a cozy game. Their life is by definition going to be interesting.

And yet the players in-character have a certain degree of choice as to just how "interesting" their lives are, don't they?

The party may not be the main characters of their world--which makes sense--but they are the main characters of their party. At least, I hope you don't have them play second fiddle to NPCs all the time. And when you, the GM, are engaging with one of those players--asking what they're doing, getting them to make rolls, stuff like that--then the camera is on them. It's those moments that should be interesting.

They rarely if ever play second fiddle to NPCs except when they actively want to (which happens now and then) but do have to realize that in effect they're usually playing second fiddle to the world they live in (not unlike our real world in that respect) and that far more often it's going to be the world moving them rather than them moving the world.

 

[hawkeyefan]

And yet even then sometimes the module beat you. Could be because you missed something vital, could be because you got in over your heads and-or got unlucky on some rolls, could be because you brought the wrong team for the job, or whatever.

Sure… but then that’s not because of the single point of failure issue we’re talking about.

Also, in past times when a party has missed something major in a module (e.g. an entire level or two) it's fairly easy to have the place become active again before long due to this, and eventually have some NPCs complain to the party "We thought you cleaned that place out; obviously you didn't!". Result: the PCs end up going back there to finish, meaning I-as-DM get two adventures for the price of one.

Yes, that’s one way to handle it. As I said, a lot of times, we’d play the modules individually, so that likely wouldn’t have happened. That was in our earliest days though.

Sounds fine to me. The characters aren't perfect and thus would be highly unlikely in the long run to end up with a perfect mission-completion record. And if they think they missed somethng or it later somehow becomes clear that they did, they can always go back and revisit that adventure.

It’s one thing to fail because you made a wrong decision or because luck wasn’t with you. It’s another to fail because of poor game design.

Not sure these statements are at all universal.

Not sure they were presented as such. But if you wanna defend crappy design, be my guest.

 

[Faolyn]

Oh, stop it! There's huge concessions to playability in all these setups! Of course there are always clear signposts telling the players whether or not some area is easier or harder than what they are able to handle. Most play would be pointless otherwise. Exactly what the delineations are and how they're telegraphed may vary a bit. Yet I bet money the random overland encounter tables in your sandbox are arranged such that mountains and swamps are the most dangerous, hills are next, and plains are the safest and lowest level. Furthermore it's highly likely that areas further from the PC's base of operations are higher level.

I don't use random encounters.

I don't bother figuring out the CR for the adversaries I use (since I rarely run monsters straight out of the book) because it's annoying and I find the CR system to be inexact and un-useful. They're all over the place, power-wise, anyway.

My sandbox is a city. Which is on a mountain. The PCs base of operations is actually in the Undercity, which is one of the most physically dangerous parts of the city. They started there at 1st level.

I don't consider plains to be safer than swamps; especially since such places would be the natural habitat of large, flying predators (and you would have minimal cover from them), and they would have much wilder weather than a swamp typically would have.

 

[kayakingpoodle]

I think, in the sandboxes I’ve seen, there is clearly consideration for things like level and danger. I don’t think that means that there are never exceptions… there may in fact be a super dangerous creature not far from the starting town, or there may be a hostile, powerful NPC among the staff at the castle.

But I don’t expect that there is no consideration about how this is all handled from the perspective of a game. These things matter and they absolutely will come up in play.

I don’t think most people construct their sandboxes without considering these kinds of factors. In fact, I don’t even see how they could do so.

There is a reason the phrase "Are you SURE you want to do that?" is a mantra in D&D.

DM control is as much about saving players from themselves as it is anything else. Few DM'S relish a TPK, but players try to off themselves with surprising regularity.

 

[Faolyn]

In isolation, they make perfect sense.

When it happens every time a roll is failed, however, it quickly starts looking contrived; because it is.

In DungeonWorld (which I haven't played), the thief has a move called Tricks of the Trade. On a 7-9 (partial success), the player gets to choose what happens--but they must pick from two of suspicion, danger, or cost. They don't get to say "nothing happens" because something happens.

So here we get (back) into trust. Do you trust your players to pick two appropriate penalties out of suspicion, danger, or cost? I would trust my players.

On a 6 or less, the player also gets to mark an XP and the GM says what happens. I don't seem to have the book anymore so I can't look up details, but I imagine it could be just like a 7-9, but possibly worse.

And yet the players in-character have a certain degree of choice as to just how "interesting" their lives are, don't they?

...that's rather my point. Have the players said they want nothing interesting to happen? Are they going out of their way to avoid conflict in favor of opening up tea shops?

Or do they go out to the dungeons and ruins and towns that are in need of help and do things?

They rarely if ever play second fiddle to NPCs except when they actively want to (which happens now and then) but do have to realize that in effect they're usually playing second fiddle to the world they live in (not unlike our real world in that respect) and that far more often it's going to be the world moving them rather than them moving the world.

Why do they "have" to realize that? Why is it important for you to hammer that into their heads?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

Yep! A huge part of WoW improving its reception by gamers generally was by moving away from old-school-D&D design, and WoW itself was a stepping away from the intensely punitive old-school D&D design of EQ.

My late father absolutely adored EQ--but he really, really disliked some of the ways that it could be needlessly obtuse, punitive, and inconsistent. When he eventually switched over to WoW, he loved it too, and very much appreciated the ways that they'd cleaned things up, made things more consistent (note: more consistent, it's very relative).

But, by that same token, I am a pretty big advocate against excessive motion in that direction. Something video game developers learned in the late 00s/early 10s was the correct lesson that games of the preceding decade (in particular RPGs, and especially "light" RPGs that had attached RPG elements to some other style) were crufty and cumbersome and frankly kind of daft a lot of the time. And much of that was rooted in the, let's say "baroque" systems and subsystems that RPGs had inherited from the TTRPG space...which mostly meant D&D. So they (again correctly!) concluded that it was good to simplify things to avoid unnecessary cognitive load, needlessly clunky mechanics, and unproductive "rough" patches of the overall experience. Unfortunately, that correct lesson was rapidly replaced with a highly incorrect one: remove ALL roughness, never allow anything whatsoever that could potentially create a quit moment, avoid complexity at all costs, etc. Or, in simpler terms, never ever ask the player to learn to play. This bad lesson was not quite noticed by the gaming public overall for a while, in part because this was an age of heavy casual player focus (e.g. the Wii was a HUGE turn toward the casual market, and the DS even moreso.) But by the late teens, yeah, folks had noticed.

The point of all this is to say that roughness in a gaming experience isn't bad in and of itself, but it needs to justify its inclusion. It should not be left to just sit there. It needs to contribute something. If it is merely roughness for its own sake, it should probably be removed. But roughness that contributes to a feeling of mastery, that makes the player feel ownership over the experience, is generally a good thing, and shouldn't be removed without good reason.

Giant powerful boss monsters just sort of wandering around in newbie zones all the time? Not a great design. Not much to learn from that, other than "the world is dangerous", which can be done in other, better ways. FFXIV and GW2 show two different ways to implement this that make it much more interesting. FFXIV has Hunt monsters: powerful enemies that only spawn occasionally in various grades. B-grade Hunts are always present (respawning in a few seconds at one of their random spawn points if killed), but they're "passive" and won't attack newbie players. A- and S-rank hunt targets are "hostile" and WILL kill you if you approach, but they're rare spawns, and generally players group up to tackle them collectively. Conversely, in GW2, the equivalent world boss encounters run like clockwork in specific places...but even low-level characters can participate, if they can physically reach the event location. They'll likely get downed, but since players are rewarded for helping downed PCs get back up, there's an incentive to help even low-level players (both the downed person and the helper get a small DPS buff; it's not much, but it means helpers do more damage for long enough that a 5s pause is in fact worthwhile.) Since these world boss encounters are on a regular schedule, many players will cycle through them, so it's rare for a solo newbie player to get caught unawares by such a thing.

Both of these are great examples of how game design is a technology that we can improve. The idea of having powerful creatures just randomly wandering the world isn't inherently bad, but it can have bad consequences that drive players away from the game. Folks have iterated on that idea to come up with ways that preserve the value of the core premise (the world is full of dangers, don't just blindly attack things, some monsters are too powerful for one person to kill, some things are aggressive and dangerous and you shouldn't approach them) while avoiding the problem parts that can seriously harm a player's experience. Likewise, From Software and their imitators have developed "hard but fair" games into an art form of their own; the games won't coddle you in the slightest, but their mechanics are consistent, telegraphs are always there even if you missed them, and everything is predictable, you just have to learn it and will get punished (often harshly) for nearly every mistake. That generally isn't my cuppa, but I know it has a dedicated following....and I also know that it includes variations in playstyles, with some openly looked down upon by the fan community as "easy mode" or the like. I don't know which ones specifically because I don't play From Software games (that kind of brutal difficulty is not for me), but I do know that From Software specifically creates games they WANT the players to consistently finish, and thus they include options which are easier to execute, requiring less technical skill, amongst other things.

 

[AlViking]

I don’t know if that’s accurate.

What if the low climb roll indicated that it took you a really ling time to climb the cliff… and because of that, your friend was killed?

There’s no reason that what happens in fail forward needs to be totally separated from the fiction. Most of the examples that suggest so seem to be coming from folks who oppose the idea… so I’m not sure if they’re doing so out of bias or some misunderstanding of how it can work or what. But it seems inaccurate to me.

I answered that. There could always be a ticking clock, the friend dies if you don't get there in time. But the cause of the death is still not the failed roll, it's the clock running out of time.

I rarely use ticking clocks with that level of precision and you could always create a ticking clock after the fact. But if I know that the clock was invented as cover for what was going to happen because I failed a roll I will enjoy the game less.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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

Okay.

How is that different from what I originally said?

Lanefan specifically said it is that the players WILL have to go through the haggle motions unless they explicitly say no. That was in response to my policy, which I was quite clear that if the players want to do it, sure, that's clearly indicating that it matters to them. But I'm not going to make them do it every single time unless-and-until they say no...each and every time.