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

[EzekielRaiden]

That sounds a lot like there are virtually no issues that aren't ultimately the GMs fault. With very few exceptions, the players can do no wrong in your eyes?

That's a really antagonistic and jaundiced view of what I wrote. Like that is actively reading the most hostile things into what I said. Are you sincerely believing that the things I wrote make that claim?

Because I don't really feel like engaging with something that sounds like it's trying to pick a fight. This sounds like "come at me, bro". I'm not really interested in doing that.

So: Would you be willing to rephrase this in a way that isn't so overtly and unnecessarily hostile?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That's a really antagonistic and jaundiced view of what I wrote. Like that is actively reading the most hostile things into what I said. Are you sincerely believing that the things I wrote make that claim?

Because I don't really feel like engaging with something that sounds like it's trying to pick a fight. This sounds like "come at me, bro". I'm not really interested in doing that.

So: Would you be willing to rephrase this in a way that isn't so overtly and unnecessarily hostile?

Nope, you are the one being hostile here. If you believe @Micah Sweet is wrong, how about you present some evidence, like pointing out when it's possible for the player to be at fault and not the GM?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ok, but 'process of play' is the thing you are designing! By explicitly focusing, like a laser on that as the base level of game design gets you to the masterpiece of clarity and effectiveness that is something like Apocalypse World. This is a huge point of the whole 'onion diagram' thing. Start with the central core of process, explicate it, make it work, add additional layers to it in steps, etc. It's this detailed focus on all the details at each layer that brings success.

Like, I don't disagree with you, but execution is everything in the end. You won't get there without going beyond teleology. Just like laws are hollow if the administration of justice is not operated well.

...okay?

Game design is not the same as game teaching. I understand that the people who enact rules (or laws) may or may not be perfect. I don't really...care? Not for this, anyway. My concern is categorizing what we make games for. Hence, why I have said every time "game-(design-)purposes". Because it's about the purposes we put into design. I find that many designers have...an extremely, indeed overwhelmingly lax attitude about this.

Or, to use your analogy there, they've blown off teleology entirely in writing their laws, and thus get confused when those laws lead to problems regardless of the quality of those who enforce them....unless those people functionally re-write the law constantly to not produce stupid results.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Nope, you are the one being hostile here. If you believe @Micah Sweet is wrong, how about you present some evidence, like pointing out when it's possible for the player to be at fault and not the GM?

Are you serious? I literally just asked for a rephrasing. That's now "hostile"?

I'm not sure I'm going to have much more to say to you after this, if you're going to roll up into this with a "no YOU'RE hostile and I DEMAND that you prove how you aren't!!!" and nothing more. But to answer your question (bolding added):

As noted, the only thing I would find frustrating is if I had already given a fair shake to an idea, explained why I wasn't comfortable with it, and provided alternate approaches or the like, and the player more or less said "NO, it has to be EXACTLY what I thought OR ELSE". That would be frustrating.​

No one needed to be a dick to anyone else to see that I had literally given an example of bad player behavior in the very post being quoted. Behavior I would find frustrating, that would make me frustrated specifically with that player, not with myself.

Hence why I asked what I asked. I knew I had literally given an example of a player behavior I found frustrating. Hence, it could not possibly be the case that my words could be interpreted as players are utterly flawless beings of pure saintly goodness who could not even conceivably do something wrong. The only way to get to that would be to actively be reading what I said unfairly and to ignore explicit statements I'd made.

 

[Maxperson]

Mmmkay.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah, this is a very good point. Nobody is entirely in character. You are rolling dice, and listening to narration, and going around the table managing focus and there IS going to be thinking about mechanics and such as well. Now maybe @Maxperson and his group have perfected never dropping even a bit out of character, I don't know. But I agree with you very much, if it happens anyway, why not reap all the great benefits that accrue from doing it? Like, there are times when it is important to be in character, but it is kind of a 90/10 rule.

False Equivalences are false. Thinking about mechanics or not being in character 24/7 is not the same as metagaming.

 

[Maxperson]

No one ever uses the word objective.

And that's objective fact.

 

[Lanefan]

Grand, does that have any impact on the concept that we can analyse whether or not the changes did or did not have precedent based on reading the rules text? You can certainly disagree about whether you like the changes made, but whether or not they had precedent should be pretty objective. I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that the changes from late era 3e to 4e are much smaller than were claimed by some people but that's largely down to late era 3e being quite different from early era 3e. And you can certainly argue that the issue was those precedents were applied too widely for people's tastes, but that's very different to denying that they exist.

Fair enough. By late-era 3.xe I'd dropped away from it; I was more used to 3e having played quite a bit of it, and played just a bit of 3.5e before dropping out to free up the time to run my own game.

Thus, when I first saw 4e it was a pretty big jump from the 3e I was used to.

 

[Lanefan]

It looks like they were given multiple attempts to do the task, rather than just a single attempt. The game didn't stall or stop because they didn't answer the riddle. It failed forward, since there were complications from the failure that weren't just "nothing happened."

So in my situation with the riddle-door, it would have been fine if the door attacked us every time we didn't answer correctly but not if the door just sits there?

Had the riddle-door attacked us every time we blew an answer we'd have all been stone dead long before we got it right. Either that, or we'd have simply given up on it fairly quickly. That it just sat there quietly meant we could keep trying to come up with the right answer.

Also, the group was given an out-of-character option to continue as is or have the GM do something about it.

Were you expecting I'd be upset about it? This is a fine encounter!

So it's a fine encounter when the PCs not only get frustrated but beaten up on blowing an answer but not fine otherwise?

I'm having a hard time making sense of that.

 

[Lanefan]

I feels this ties back to something @AlViking said upthread, where he believed that Trad-gamers try immerse themself into the character whereas the other side treat the character as some sort of avatar.

I suspect there is some truth to that but it is not the whole story there is also:
- Trad-gamers believe immersion comes from knowledge limitation in an attempt to mimic RL in order to play a character true; whereas
- the Narrative side freely gives the meta knowledge in an attempt get it out the way, and allow the player to rather focus on the truth of the character.

Interesting, in that I see not giving that information as the by-far best means of keeping it out of the way. Once the players have that meta knowledge, it's in the way no matter what.

A Trad-gamer is concerned with the numbers, the game prioritises the numbers, and thus meta knowledge is hurtful to immersion.
To a Narrative gamer the stakes, character bonds, win/loss conditions etc are in a sense more important than the numbers, therefore the meta knowledge doesn't lessen their character's truth.

Numbers concern is more the realm of small-g gamists rather than trad-gamers (these are not necessarily the same thing).

For @Lanefan the meta-knowledge being revealed is akin to cheating, because it is assumed a player cannot play their character true having that information, which, IMHO, is not a good reflection on the game.

Decades of observation plus my own play tells me loud and clear that this assumption is correct.