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

[Micah Sweet]

For sure. Some players like it when their characters fail a climbing check and then fall to their deaths.

You act as if no one's ever fallen off a cliff to their death before. Why should that never happen?

 

[AlViking]

An example of fail forward from Failing Forward – RPG Concepts for failing to pick a lock.

"Failing forward is the idea that you still get to unlock the door on a failed roll, but it comes at a cost. So you get into the house, but you startle a cook who screams. Now your plan of sneaking around the house slowly and avoiding all the guards is shot. You’re in the house, so you better use your opportunity, but this is going to be more of a smash and grab than a cat burglary."

Did the cook exist before the failure? No. It's a quantum cook that only comes into existence because the roll failed. I would not like that kind of game. In the style of game I want to play the cook was there whether or not picking the lock was successful.

There are different approaches, fail forward is just one I do not care for even if it works for other games and players.

 

[AlViking]

Huh? The whole of D&D combat resolution ignores forward-facing causality. Person A does their 6 seconds worth of stuff. Then we go back in time and Person B does their 6 seconds of stuff. And so on, until everyone has had a go.

Where are you getting that? If A kills B, B does not suddenly pop back to life to get a chance to kill A first. Admittedly rounds and initiatives will always be an ugly compromise but there is no going back in time. There is no good system that I've seen for resolving simultaneous actions with the relative simplicity of initiative and turn based combat.

It's far from perfect, it's just better for what it sets out to do than alternatives I've seen. There's also no "going back in time".

 

[hawkeyefan]

Whether of not they successfully climbed the wall.

But it was said we only roll if there are stakes. What are the stakes? What does it mean to unsuccessfully climb a wall?

It's what was defined as fail-forward. You succeed at the task but something bad happens.

But not something bad that doesn’t fit the situation.

Good grief.

 

[pemerton]

Saying that you've agreed to follow the DM's campaign is not the same as abdicating control of your character.

This has nothing to do with actor vs author stance, which describe different ways a player goes about making decisions for their PC. "Author stance" describes a player making decisions for their PC because of things the player cares about rather than things the PC cares about - such as, in this case, making sure the GM's adventure gets played.

Of course I also haven't seen a definition of stance from the GM's perspective.

There is no such definition. Stance is a way of describing player decision-making.

Did he ask you about the Forge's opinion?

I made a post, not addressed to any particular poster, about the reference in the 2024 D&D rules to players making decisions from the point of view of the player - ie choosing to follow the GM's hook - rather than the point of view of the character; which is called "author stance" in a terminology that was introduced into this thread by another poster at [https://www.enworld.org/threads/ran...d-fans-is-exhausting.712674/post-9664372]post 7739[/url].

@AlViking asked what the point of my post was. I replied. Then AlViking replied in a rather dismissive way, when all I had done was answer the question asked. If someone doesn't care "how the Forge would define anything", then why ask me about my post which used the phrase "author stance"?

 

[pemerton]

what I’m saying is that fail forward type techniques tend to use what’s going on in the game. The GM looks at the situation and comes up with a sensible, related consequence other than outright failure.

Right. I posted this about a month ago upthread:

People who are just making up outcomes without regard to the tasks and their intents during resolution are like the Apocalypse World GMs John Harper blogged about, whose hard move is to have ninjas drop from the ceiling: The Mighty Atom They need to work on their play!

More recently I posted that examples of bad narration don't show that good narration is not possible. To reiterate my month-old self: people who are stuck doing bad narration need to work on their play!

I mean, imagine if I tried to prove that interesting dungeon play is impossible because one time I made this dungeon and it was really boring and no one enjoyed playing through it?

 

[AlViking]

But it was said we only roll if there are stakes. What are the stakes? What does it mean to unsuccessfully climb a wall?




But not something bad that doesn’t fit the situation.

Good grief.

But something that only exists because you failed a roll. If it works for you, great. It doesn't for me. Why can't you just accept that we have different preferences?

 

[Campbell]

But something that only exists because you failed a roll. If it works for you, great. It doesn't for me. Why can't you just accept that we have different preferences?

I fully accept your preferences. What personally bothers me is the way you leap to conclusions about how these techniques are used in play. In particular you often assume that the techniques used in other playstyles will used in the most inartful way possible.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You act as if no one's ever fallen off a cliff to their death before. Why should that never happen?

I'll point out people have heart attacks and die, but we don't normally do that in a game. So its not a question of "does it happen" but "does it serve the purposes of the game to pay attention to that incidence." And with proper climbing gear and preparation, the frequency of one, while many times that of the other, is likely well below the resolution probability of the game system.

 

[pemerton]

Where are you getting that? If A kills B, B does not suddenly pop back to life to get a chance to kill A first. Admittedly rounds and initiatives will always be an ugly compromise but there is no going back in time.

Yes there is. We resolve all of A's actions, including their movement. Then we go back 6 seconds and resolve all of B's actions.

The alternative is to imagine that the world of D&D really is a stop-motion one.

There is no good system that I've seen for resolving simultaneous actions with the relative simplicity of initiative and turn based combat.

It's far from perfect, it's just better for what it sets out to do than alternatives I've seen.

There are lots of wargames and RPGs that use simultaneous resolution. Gygax's AD&D tries to adopt an approach closer to simultaneous resolution, although the details are notoriously obscure.

In any event, I'm not making a post about what system is better. I'm pointing out that turn-by-turn resolution does not adhere to forward-facing causality.