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

[Maxperson]

A won initiative, which means in the fiction they are acting more rapidly. They may have gotten their shot off and shut the door before B could react.

If B had won initiative they could have readied an action and shot A.

@pemerton is mostly right in his view on this. The initiative process produces ridiculous results if you look at things happening simultaneously or close to it.

A PC can open a door, walk 10 feet into a room, have his 30' darkvision kick in and see 20 goblins at the edge of his vision. Neither side is surprised. They roll initiative and the PC rolls a 12 and the goblins 13. All 20 goblins can move and dash 40 feet to cut off the PC and keep him from leaving out of that door, despite the PC not being surprised and being only 10 feet from the door.

In any kind of realistic simultaneous combat situation, it would be pretty much impossible for the goblins to start moving and cross 30 feet before that PC could move 10 feet out of the door. The game treats the PC as stuck in time until his turn. Hell, he can't even shout out a cry for help until his turn comes up.

That leaves us either ignoring the situation and just playing the game, which is what I think most of us do, or pretending it's simultaneous which involves a lot of loony tunes stuff happening, like the PC falling down or running in place, to explain how he failed to move 10 feet or shout, "HELP!"

Simply saying it happened before the PC could react doesn't work, because there's no remotely realistic explanation for why a lot of things happen the way they do in combat situations.

 

[Maxperson]

Well I found it on DnD Beyond, and I didn't have to speak a special DM password to get access to it.

It still was written to DMs. 1) you can't assume that all players are on there and aren't using the physical books, 2) just because it was on there and players can see it, doesn't make it written for them.

 

[AlViking]

I will just say that personally I don't care for Trolley Car problems whether I'm playing or running a game. If the characters truly can't save C it will typically be done off-screen because I don't want to give the players false hope, it would feel contrived. About the only exception would be if a BBEG is responsible and is intended to be an ongoing menace and I want to ratchet up the hate. I can't remember ever doing that but it's possible.

This seems to be along the lines of "when should one's opponent in chess knock over their king". Ought they to wait until checkmate is offered, or ought they to do so as soon as they see that there is no line of play that escapes it? That makes me wonder what counts as our proper locations of play? Is it strictly up to when the outcome is preordained, or can it fall in times leading up or overruning that? To get at what I mean about our "locations of play" I want to look at some related albeit in respects dissimilar cases.

Situation A -- C is alive at the start, but doomed. That's the set up. What we're going to play to find out is what our H's will do in their (futile) attempt to save C. Game play is going to be located in the scenes where we see how that goes.​

Which I would just find frustrating.

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Situation B -- C is alive at the start and after each round of player actions GM will secretly roll to see if C has been sacrificed. There's a chance that our H's can reach C before they've been sacrificed. As it happens, the dice decide that C is sacrificed before our H's get to them. Ought GM to reveal this? Will game play end when it is revealed?​

I think there should be some indication of the possibility but I wouldn't reveal exact details during play. If someone asks after the game I can't think of a reason I wouldn't tell them but during combat I want to maintain the immersion.

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Situation C -- C is alive at the start and after each round of player actions GM will decide if C has been sacrificed. There's a chance that our H's can reach C before they've been sacrificed. As it happens, GM decides that C is sacrificed before our H's get to them. Ought GM to reveal this? Will game play end when it is revealed?​

The GM may be more lenient that dice (or not, depends on odds assigned to the dice) but this would feel unnecessarily arbitrary to me. It also feels very "What will be most dramatic" which is not my preference as a GM.

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Situation D -- C is guaranteed to be alive when players reach them. We play to find out not whether they will reach C in time, but what our H's will need to do to get there. It seems this mirrors A, where game play is going to be located in the scenes where we see how that goes.​

If there's a time limit like this I'll do my best to broadcast it, or at least give the characters opportunities to know that there's a ticking clock. This would likely be my preferred option as long as the deadline is established in-character. I'll even remind the players that the characters know there's a ticking clock and how close it is.

​

Assessing cases like these makes me continue to wonder why it matters whether GM decides or dice decide?* They raise interesting questions around whether and when a preordained outcome should be disclosed, and where groups might locate their game play? In reference to sandbox, if game play is located in the journey and not the destination, then what sorts of worries about that should I have?


*One answer we've discussed in the past is VB's observation that GM will make less stern decisions than the dice will.

 

[AlViking]

"Appeal to authority" is only a fallacy if the authority is unsubstantiated. AKA, if I were to site Joseph Schmoe on the subject of double jeopardy in the United States and whether a mistrial will thus result in functional acquittal (due to the constitutional restriction against double jeopardy) or in a retrial (due to the Supreme Court's stated understanding that the right to not being tried for the same offense requires some deference to getting a speedy and fair trial), that would be an appeal to authority fallacy.

But if I were to cite Justice Brennan, in United States v. Lanza, that would not be an appeal to authority fallacy--it would be an appeal to a legitimate authority on the subject, particularly since Lanza established that it is not double jeopardy to be tried by a state court, and then subsequently tried in federal court, and indeed is the reason we have the "double sovereignty" doctrine in the first place.

Now, obviously that's an unequivocal example since Brennan himself wrote the opinion which established this precedent. But it's not like Luke Crane is some no-context nobody. You may or may not like his conclusions. You may find his diction or his style or his approach awesome or terrible or mediocre or whatever else. But let us not pretend that he is an irrelevancy. He is, for all intents and purposes, one of the foremost voices on the study of roleplaying game design. You may argue that his opinions are wrong, that's perfectly within your rights. But saying that it's an appeal to authority fallacy to reference his body of work? No. That's not valid. Just because you don't accept a person as being an authority, doesn't mean you can then assert anyone else doing so is automatically committing a fallacy.

(Nor, it's worth noting, is it valid to conclude that because an argument used a fallacious line of reasoning, it must therefore be wrong. That's the fallacy fallacy. "Whales have hair; Mammals have hair; Therefore, whales are mammals" is a fallacious argument, even though the premises and the conclusion are all true. It's just that the truth of the conclusion does not follow from the truth of the premises.)

When it comes to game theory and definitions, there is no authority there are only opinions. Some opinions and preferences are more popular than others, that does not make them more authoritative.

 

[FrogReaver]

Huh? It's not fallacious to appeal to authority. Given that most of us are not geniuses, we rely on authorities for most of our knowledge.

Huh? So what happens when my authorities say yours is wrong?

 

[Campbell]

If I tried to use them, they definitely would be. In every Narrativist I've ever played in, they were used in an inartful way, playing up the parts of those mechanic I dislike.

It's a skill that needs to be developed and you are basically starting at square one as a GM. Experience running more conventional games will get in the way more often than it helps (in my personal experience). You would likely still not enjoy playing, but there is a tremendous difference between a GM who is just getting started with this stuff and someone who has years of experience framing scenes and most importantly knows how to establish stakes to follow up on.

The most important element of running a game that utilizes GM Moves is getting good at setting up moves. Establishing and telegraphing what is at play and then following up on the threats you have made. You must make a move that follows from what you have established. It might introduce new elements, but that must be done in addition and with care.

Note that you here means the GM of games that are structured this way. Not GMs broadly.

My point is when we talk about these things we almost always assume expert level, decades of experience conventional GMs and assume novice GMing (for the sort of play we're speaking on) for other styles of play. That might be the context many people are used to encountering different modes of play on these boards, but it is far from doing a good job of capturing how play is intended to work or the range of play people experience in varying styles.

 

[clearstream]

Just to be clear, almost all my posts on this subject have been about single-points-of-failure, not fail-forward per se. As I noted, I'm agnostic whether fail-forward is always the way to address those.

Got it. The chain from #10,425 made it appear to be connected. Also, am I misreading some hedging in your above ("is always" seems to imply "sometimes is")?

It's been a long thread...

 

[Maxperson]

Causality gets broken routinely - as in my example, A gets to duck behind cover at the end of their 6 seconds of action, and that affects everything that B does from the beginning of their 6 seconds of action.

Or with your example: if A moves their full movement, and then shoots; while B is standing in a doorway or next to a tree: A gets to take the shot, and B is not able to duck for cover.

This only conforms to forwards causality if we assume that B is frozen, inactive, for all of A's activity.

If it all happened simultaneously, then B would be able to shoot before A takes cover; or would be able to take cover before A shoots.

Yeah. The only place I disagree with you on this is from your former post where you say that you think most people treat D&D combat as simultaneous. I think they just mostly just ignore it, because treating is as virtually simultaneous would quickly reduce combat to slapstick comedy in the fiction in order to explain the myriad of events happening the way they play out with the mechanics.

 

[Micah Sweet]

No.

An important figure frequently cited for his authoritative perspective on "traditional GM" play and whose name is often attached thereto (e.g. "Gygaxian naturalism"), commenting on the topic with a critical eye toward realism above all else, would be useful. Especially if it is as logorrheic as Gygax was wont to be, since that generally implies examples and arguments, not just a flat declarative with no further meat.

Useful in what way? Do you expect proponents of traditional games to be so influenced by GG's opinions that informing them of something he said that supports your point of view would suddenly cause the scales to fall from our eyes? You'll notice that the vast majority of the game designer quotations being thrown about in this discussion (no matter if it's Gary Gygax, Ron Edwards, or someone else) are made by the non-traditionalists. Perhaps that is because the opinions of such people simply do not hold the same weight for us that they do for you. If that is the case, I'm not sure what having a new Gygax quote is going to do for you.

 

[FrogReaver]

Well, if I may, there are two unanswered questions here, and a subsequent slightly different conception of this same thing to see if we're paying too much attention to the upholstery without paying attention to the engine, metaphorically speaking.

Question 1: Does the player know that the amount of time they have to respond to the problem is randomly determined?

If the player doesn't even know that much, then they're going to do a lot of things that they probably wouldn't with that knowledge, and finding out afterward...well. I can't imagine I would be particularly enthused to find that out after I'd already blown resources and done other such things only to learn that the result was genuinely decided before I ever began. (And, for anyone who might respond such, yes I know real life has lots of stuff like that, but that specific part of real life is one of the things games are generally designed in opposition to, namely, designed such that you legitimately have a shot, even if it's a slim one.)

Question 2: Assuming the player does know it's random, is the random roll made such that H knows success was always at least possible, regardless of what was rolled? That is, if the absolute bare minimum rounds needed to climb the cliff is (say) 2, does the player know that that's also the minimum roll on how long until C is sacrificed?

I ask this question because if you don't know that, then that means you're taking a risk, probably a pretty sizable one, that it literally doesn't matter what you do or how you play, you're going to fail at your goal. That would seem to be pretty damaging to the gameplay of the situation.

Now, for my re-contextualization of this situation. Specifically, I'm removing the roleplay portion, and reducing this to just the gameplay elements. So, we have a setup where:

• There is a dealer/croupier/organizer/whatever
• There is a player
• The player's goal is to roll (draw cards, spin the roulette wheel, whatever) to meet or beat a known total within a limit of attempts
• The limit is unknown to both the player and the dealer/croupier/etc., generated by a random source (e.g. dice, cards, whatever)
• The player may pony up additional stake, which the house collects regardless of the result, but which could help them reach the total
• The player's efforts end when they have exhausted their resources or reached the total, whichever comes first
• Only after the player reaches the total will the random time limit be revealed
• If the player's number of rounds spent is less than or equal to the limit, the player wins; otherwise, they lose

That....doesn't sound like it has much "gameplay" at all. Sure, you can do various things, you can spend resources etc., but because the dice decided the limit in advance, a goodly portion of the time you're either simply SOL because the limit was too low to matter, or your success was always guaranteed because the limit was so high it no longer mattered. And the whole time, you have only a very limited idea of how tense things are.

It's like being in a "race" where the finish line is actually invisible to the players, and nobody knows how long the race is. That's not much of a race anymore, and looks a lot more like a mere guessing game.

I look at clocks in Blades in the Dark. They tick, but they do so at the DMs whim because he can always choose a non clock tick consequence for any roll. IMO, that’s an invisible finish line masquerading as something more objective.