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

[Faolyn]

Do you see why this would bother people who think making decisions about how to spend time while traveling is an important part of the game?

But that was making a decision about how the character spent their time traveling. What it wasn't was actually roleplaying out the search for herbs. Is that the problem here? Because then the question is, if this herbalism "side quest" takes more than a couple of minutes, what are the rest of the players doing? Best case scenario, they're using the time to do some personal RP, but you can't assume that's inevitably going to be the case.

 

[pemerton]

Appeal to popularity. The current edition of the most popular RPG appears to support their point, which somehow makes it more correct.

Huh? Upthread you posted something similar to what the DMG says:

It's certainly a factor in most games IMO, but the first heuristic is the one I focus on and is far more important to me. In particular, I very much do not want rules that specifically encourage or require the second heuristic be followed. Most if my players might often choose to make decisions this way, but they don't have to, and I don't want them to feel that they do.

 

[Maxperson]

But it’s not really a retcon. Retcons change something that’s been established, or somehow provide new context that changes how we perceive what we knew.

Skipping past a travel scene means we’ve not established what happened during the journey. Which leaves us free to determine if anything meaningful or interesting happened or not.



I never said they were exactly the same. I disagreed with your statement that they were “two very different things”.

They’re not that different. Both involve a player asking for his character to find herbs. Both will likely involve a roll to see if the search succeeds.

That one asks “during” the journey and another asks “after” the journey is the key difference… but it’s not nearly as significant as you’re making it out to be.



I disagree, for the reasons stated above. First, it’s not really a retcon. Second, the player requests and the resolution of the request are largely the same.

It's still very different, because your player could pick any of thousands and thousands of different ways to add to the past. This not even close to being the same as doing it in the present.

Just because the end result looks very similar, does not make them largely the same. They aren't.

It still meets the definition of retcon, which just means that a new piece of information is added that changes the prior interpretation of an event. Prior, we traveled. After, we traveled and foraged for herbs. Adding in foraging for herbs alters what happened in the fiction, which was just travel.

 

[Micah Sweet]

OK, so why did you ask me about it? And then yell at me when I answered your question?

Did he ask you about the Forge's opinion?

 

[The Firebird]

As long as you can see how focusing on every moment and every bit of tedium would bother people who want to focus on more interesting matters.

I see that you find these bits tedious. But phrasing it as if that's objectively true does not help your case.

But that was making a decision about how the character spent their time traveling. What it wasn't was actually roleplaying out the search for herbs. Is that the problem here? Because then the question is, if this herbalism "side quest" takes more than a couple of minutes, what are the rest of the players doing? Best case scenario, they're using the time to do some personal RP, but you can't assume that's inevitably going to be the case.

The decision about how to spend time was considered unimportant and worth skipping until it came up. Not everyone considers it unimportant in that way.

 

[The Firebird]

What you should realize is that "interesting" doesn't mean ZOMG EXCITING!!1!. It means "not nothing." Because nothing is, well, nothing.

I find nothing happens to be an interesting result. Where does that leave us?

 

[Lanefan]

Normally there will be an informational-difference. It seems like temporal linearity is normal in sandbox play; I wonder though, if changing that does any real harm to sandbox? Perhaps because in our real-world experience we don't experience any abilty to change the past, a mode of play that prioritises feeling like one is in a real-world would be adverse to flashbacks (even when they are explained as not involving time travel the experienced time-sequence stops being linear.)

Temporal linearity in play is important to me.

And because of this I'm running aground all over the place right now in the game I'm running: most of the current party recently (in real-world time) got divinely blipped a year and a half backward in game-world time and are now having to take all kinds of crazy measures to avoid meeting their earlier selves or causing other historical discontinuities.

 

[AlViking]

I wouldn’t call them coincidences. If you don’t climb a cliff fast enough, and an ally is therefore killed because you were not there to help… that’s a consequence, not a coincidence.

It's just a coincidence that the extra amount of time it takes is just long enough for your friend to be killed. And this coincidental timing just happens to occur every time I fail a check.

Right.

 

[Enrahim]

I find nothing happens to be an interesting result. Where does that leave us?

One of my favorite rpg situations were when the players spent about 1 hour trying to figure out what was up with an obvious trap at the bottom of a staircase (holes in the ceiling, and a mechanism that turned the stairs into a slide). Finally they sort of gave up and decided to just enter the area. Nothing happened. (the trap had been triggered long ago, without any automatic reset) Maybe it is wrong to call that the most "interesting" result, but I think it might easily be the most amusing/memorable result possible.

 

[Lanefan]

You're on a discussion board on the internet posting specific reasons that you seem to have identified on why you find a style of play implausible. The natural reaction is for people to go "that's interesting, you seem to have identified specific problems that I don't see or seem to be contrary with how I understand this style of play. Have you considered that if XYZ, it might be more plausible?" Like, if people raise specific objections (and they're doing so in good faith), then it's natural for a subsequent post to be "let me try and answer those objections." In part at least because when people show up going "you may find your preferred mechanisms of play plausible but quite clearly they're not and I refuse to accept any statements to the contrary" it's like cool, I guess? Thanks for sharing your viewpoint?

If you say "I dont like this/vibe with this" and enumerate why then it's generally not going to get a similar response, and also won't carry the same feeling of judgement.

The raising of specific objections is the "enumerate why" piece, and it's the raising of those objections that tends to run smack into the unfavourable judgment of others.