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

[pemerton]

But only the first part of that passage supported their point! Why would they bring up the rest?

I quoted the relevant passages upthread. There is no "the rest", is there?

(Not that you would ever accuse me of lying or manipulating information.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure. That doesn't mean that it's a fallacy to believe them because of their expertise. I can tell you that drivers in Australia travel on the left (British or Japanese style) rather than on the right (US or French style). Why do you believe me?

All you've got is testimony. I mean, you could travel to Australia and check it out. But most human knowledge depends upon accepting the testimony of those who are qualified to give it (ie authorities). That's why the notion that it's a fallacy to appeal to authority is a fallacy.

I think if someone wants to know what Luke Crane thinks action resolution should look like, reading the rules that he wrote is a pretty good way to learn.

But someone upthread said that, on the contrary, that would be a fallacious appeal to authority!

(Ironically, that same poster probably expects the rest of us to take their posts as authoritative evidence of what they believe.)

Who says any of us care what Luke Crane (or Gary Gygax, or Ron Edwards, or or or) have to say about this? We all make our own decisions and play our own games. I don't see how these constant quotes from the "giants" or RPGs do anything more than score debate points. I'd much rather talk about what we each ourselves think and feel.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't think you're lying. But you appear to use the D&D combat rules. That's enough for me to infer how versimilitudinous combat is. I believe that you use the D&D PC building rules. Which is enough for me to infer how verisimilitudinous the characters are.

Which is all I have done. I prefer verisimilitudinous RPGing.

I use Level Up's combat and character-building rules for my 5e play. They're not perfectly verisimilitudinous, but they get me near what I want, and I keep working to make them work better for me. Your opinion that that's not good enough to suit your personal definitions is just that, and I'd thank you to respect that opinion.

 

[AlViking]

Yes, it's a consequence of failure. If you succeeded, you wouldn't suffer the complication. Eg if you get to the top of the cliff in time, your friend who is to be sacrificed at the appointed time will still be alive.

I don't know what this means. The complication is an event, so I'm not sure what you mean by saying that it "exists only because of the failure".

I mean, if I lose a D&D combat, my PC is dead only because of the failure. That was the point of rolling the dice! If someone - the GM? - has already decided what is going to happen next, why are the dice being rolled?

If the character hadn't failed to pick a lock there would have been no screaming chef. The only reason the chef exists in the fiction is because of a failed check. If that's not clear enough there's nothing else I can say.

 

[zakael19]

Character death due to arbitrary roll is not high-stakes, though; it's random crap. In fact, character death is the least imaginative of stakes to be high.

I was re-reading some fairly old V. Baker posts recently (I think I talked about this ages ago in this thread as well), and he notes that if "what you want out of roleplaying is suspense, resolution, story, theme, character, meaning" then "PCs, like protagonists in fiction, don't get to die to show what's at stake or to escalate conflict. They only get to die to make final statements. Character death can never be a possible outcome moment-to-moment."

Apocalypse World has this via the "When life becomes untenable..." move choices, and we have newer explicitly narrative focused games like Fabula Ultima, Daggerheart etc that do some really cool stuff around death as well. I think that this is one of the weird ways in which Dungeon World is straddling multiple worlds/cultures of play in its design in that it drops the fantastic framing of AW's move for a pretty cool but less narrative fulfillment focused Death's Door.

 

[AlViking]

If the house is one that is likely to have a cook, why is it shocking or unrealistic for there to be a cook?

Who said the house is likely to have a cook? Is the cook in kitchen 24 hours a day? Who needs a chef at 2 AM? The point is that if the character had succeeded on their check the cook would not have been there they were invented after the fact because of a failure.

How does that work? Do you pause the game or end the session early so you have time to prepare? Do you rely on random tables? Do you literally populate every single building in every single settlement in your world before the game starts? Are your players allowed to take any actions that you haven't already prepared for?

How does what work? If they're breaking into a business in the middle of the day I will have decided whether or not there will be someone in the back room. If it's uncertain if there's someone in the back room, I'll determine the odds and roll for it. If they wait until the middle of the night and the business is only open during the day and doesn't pay to have a security guard, there will be no one in the back room. Of course the players can always do whatever they want and so so on a regular basis. If I haven't thought about something ahead of time I'll make a judgement call based on what makes sense in the fictional world. Are they breaking into a business? What kind? Is it the kind that could employ a security guard or perhaps a watch dog? If I think it's possible but not guaranteed I'll roll the dice. What I won't do is make up something on the fly because they failed a check because I want a complication unrelated to their check.

I really don't see what the confusion is. It's not a difficult concept. If other games have quantum cooks that only exist if an open lock check fails, that's fine. I just don't want to play that game.

 

[Eric V]

But you can decide not to climb in the first place, and bear whatever consequences that decision may carry.

Sure, we can rp characters staying at home.

Good game!

 

[Campbell]

If the character hadn't failed to pick a lock there would have been no screaming chef. The only reason the chef exists in the fiction is because of a failed check. If that's not clear enough there's nothing else I can say.

Why are we assuming the GM has not put any work into establishing stakes here? That they have telegraphed no dangers? Because if it's the case that they have not then they are making novice mistakes for any game that involves these sorts of techniques. If this is listed as an example than it is an incomplete or poor one because while we leave a fair number of things unfixed it's on GMs to follow from established (shared with the group) fiction.

 

[Eric V]

I was re-reading some fairly old V. Baker posts recently (I think I talked about this ages ago in this thread as well), and he notes that if "what you want out of roleplaying is suspense, resolution, story, theme, character, meaning" then "PCs, like protagonists in fiction, don't get to die to show what's at stake or to escalate conflict. They only get to die to make final statements. Character death can never be a possible outcome moment-to-moment."

Apocalypse World has this via the "When life becomes untenable..." move choices, and we have newer explicitly narrative focused games like Fabula Ultima, Daggerheart etc that do some really cool stuff around death as well. I think that this is one of the weird ways in which Dungeon World is straddling multiple worlds/cultures of play in its design in that it drops the fantastic framing of AW's move for a pretty cool but less narrative fulfillment focused Death's Door.

Everyone I know in 35 years of roleplaying together is looking for those things, yeah. There are other joys to be had too, but they are often better served in board games like Roll Player Adventures, Tainted Grail, etc.

Jonathan Hickman apparently has (or had) a rule in his 13th Age game that PCs can only be killed by named villains...I thought this captured it nicely. Doesn't mean PCs can't lose, but they don't die. Similarly, in Sentinel Comics RPG, only the player gets to decide if his PC dies.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure, we can rp characters staying at home.

Good game!

Is there nothing else to do in this hypothetical game than climb a wall?