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

[EzekielRaiden]

I am short on alloted time. So just two-three quick comments.

Your first part is mostly fine. But I am still pretty sure if you show up on an adventurers league game as a DM and start narrating regular failures in a similar way as people expect crit failures to be narrated, you will be called out.

And that is anyway missing the point of the quote you replied to. For me as a DM to be fine with taking patial control over the narrative by introducing complications, I feel like the players must have implicitly asked me to do it. If I were following the idea of players have no clue, I wouldn't be able to do anything. Hence I assume general familiarity with mainstream D&D culture when running a D&D game.

And living world is of course compatible with varying scope, and "soft" fail forward of the "no retries" variety. It is the "hard" fail forward where something particularly dramatic happens to drive the story on I think is incompatible.

I guess I don't understand how this counts as, in your words, "taking partial control over the narrative"...

...when the whole time it's been extremely clear to me that the "traditional GM" ALWAYS has near-complete control over the narrative.

They're just under an extremely weak, unstated expectation to only use that control in particular ways...unless and until they think that that expectation is getting in the way of a good experience. A thing they are not only not expected to tell their players about, but which they almost never will tell their players about. (These two things are precisely what makes it a weak expectation: it may be overridden, at any time, so long as the GM thinks it right, and that overriding not only can be but almost surely will be done in secret, often with pains taken to conceal it from the players. Either condition alone would be a significant weakening of the limitation; together, they make for hardly any limitation at all.)

 

[hawkeyefan]

Which points out what might be a difference here.

When I think of what happens in the fiction due to a roll, I'm thinking of the immediate stakes on which the roll is made. Do I climb the cliff or fall. Can I open the lock or am I stuck here. Can I sneak past the guards or do they notice me. Those are stakes.

Anything and everything beyond that falls under downstream consequences, which are not the same thing as immediate stakes and are also not always (as in very rarely) 100% predictable or guaranteed. They can very often be changed, mitigated, or even eliminated by subsequent actions provided those actions are themselves successful.

Again, I think that this atomization of tasks is something that’s only being done for game purposes. It seems like a very unnatural way to discuss actions and consequences.

Now, as far as a game goes, I understand that it may be a preference. So may including more in the roll than just pass/fail. The games being mentioned that don’t want “nothing happens” to be a result… they expect the GM to decide what it means to pass or fail (likely with some guidance from the rules).

It’s the GM’s job to tell us what happens next.

Falling due to a failed climb doesn't necessarily even mean I'm going to go splat at the bottom - I might grab a handhold and slow or stop my fall, I might have someone below willing to take the risk of trying to catch me, someone (including myself) might have a magical means of preventing or easing my fall, and so on; and despite the fairly obvious train of causality in the fiction these would all - if available - be declared and resolved as independent actions.

Sure. All of those would be possible outcomes (or consequences) of a fall. I fell… so I had to use a spell slot to cast Featherfall.

Not I fell so I fell.

In hindsight, it might come down to did I go splat because I fell or did I go splat because you didn't catch me.

Oh no no no… according to your logic, if I didn’t catch you, all that happens is I didn’t catch you.

When you go splat, it’s because of the downstream consequence of your skull colliding with the ground.

A downstream consequence, not related to the immediate stakes of opening the jar.

How is it a “downstream consequence”? How is it not related? I can’t get the jar open, so now I need to go get a new jar of pickles for my pregnant wife. Seems

Ditto re worrying about the mindanity in an actual game. The example is intentionally very mundane in order to remove all the baggage surrounding the break-in example we've been using.

Do you make people roll to open pickle jars in games?

A lot of the examples we've been given of fail-forward in this thread seem to be doing just that: hosing the characters by adding in extra complications rather than just narrating a straight nothing-happens result. Some of the games even tell the GM do this, put in terms of "always drive them toward conflict" or similarm which makes it seem like a very stressful way to play.

Are your players made of glass? Will they break so easily?

I mean, for someone who touts his old school combat as war, no snowflakes allowed kind of game, you seem awfully reluctant for there to be negative consequences on a failed roll.

It works just fine.

Consequence, not stake; and only visible as such in hindsight after any other possible consequences or outcomes have been somehow eliminated.

No, some are very obvious.

No, in that the surrounding conditions will be changing the odds of success.

Yes in that the actual task resolution still comes down to a binary succeed-fail on whether the lock is picked or not; and also in that the immediate stakes - whether or not the lock is opened - are the same.

So the surrounding conditions can affect the odds of success… but they don’t inform the outcome?

You would say these two thieves are facing the same consequences?

Don’t you think that’s bizarre?

 

[Maxperson]

Then maybe not every lockpicking needs to be the result of a roll?

That's true. Only when the outcome is in doubt and failure has meaning should there be a roll.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That's true. Only when the outcome is in doubt and failure has meaning should there be a roll.

Well, you'll want to talk to @Lanefan about that, as he's rejected both the idea that failure needs to have any meaning, and the idea that success needs to have any meaning (I presume separately, as if both are true simultaneously I'm pretty sure even he would say "don't bother", but I could be mistaken.)

This, for instance, is one of the reasons why I don't think it so horrendous to talk about, for example, a guard or servant* to walk past a secondary servants' entrance into the house. Keep in mind, in medieval, renaissance, and early modern periods, servants had their own halls, staircases, etc. they were supposed to use. At essentially all times other than "direct personal service" situations, servants were supposed to stay completely out of sight. Dusting, sweeping, mopping, etc. were to be done while the family was asleep, unless a sudden emergency occurred (e.g. a major spill caused by the family or guests), or the family needed special service (e.g. "we're hosting prestigious guests for supper, get the house completely spic-and-span!") So it's very much A Thing that, during the wee hours, various servants would clean, prepare, organize, etc., etc. so that the family could rise fresh and ready the next morning, seeing only their direct personal servants (e.g. the ladies' personal maids, the gentlemen's manservants, the butler of the house, etc.)

Most locks, so long as they aren't some bizarro newfangled design, are not that much of a challenge to pick, having watched a fair amount of the Lock-Picking Lawyer--assuming you have the right tools. Hence, for most locks, what matters is less can you pick it, because the answer is most probably "yes"--what matters is how much time it'll cost you. A robust lock might take a good while, especially to one unfamiliar with its design, but unless it genuinely requires a specialized tool, whether or not it can be picked really shouldn't be in doubt. (And, I'll note, if it did require a specialized tool to pick it, that would imply the lock couldn't ever have been picked in the first place, which has been explicitly ruled out--success was possible when our Thief began picking.)

As a result, a difficult-but-not-impossible pick might have to be stopped, not because the picker cannot do it whatsoever, but because doing so is no longer safe. Most security measures work exactly like this. Security isn't, and cannot be, absolute. Instead, security measures are an effort to make it too risky to try. A lock that the best lockpickers can only get through after an hour's concerted work is a very good lock, because an hour is an extremely long amount of time for the would-be burglar to just sit there, doing nothing, focused intently on the lock. That's a risk almost all burglars would avoid--all but a very few, very brave and usually very foolish, would avoid it.

When coupled with the above, is it really so unreasonable to say that the result of "failure" is "you weren't able to get through the lock before attention was drawn to the door you were trying to get through"? That seems like quite a reasonable, and indeed realistic, answer. A lock that is simply impossible for a trained (but perhaps green) lockpicker to pick, solely due to skill level, is less realistic than one that is simply very challenging to pick, and which would take too much time for this trained(-but-maybe-green) Thief.

The fact that this advances the fiction toward some kind of conclusion (in this case, toward discovery and thus either failure of the stealth mission, or needing to risk violence to complete their objectives) is thus a bonus on top of an already-realistic situation: Servants are milling about even though the family is asleep (a typical situation in manor-houses for centuries in Europe, from medieval to industrial times), guards are patrolling, and the Thief is much more likely to be skilled enough to pick the lock eventually but not soon enough, rather than being simply incapable of it at all.

*"Cook" was the specific term used earlier, but it could be any servant, cooks are just likely to be near to one of the most plausible servant-entrance doors of a manor house.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Mod Note:

Given that this is a touchy subject to start with, can we NOT engage in snark? Can we please minimize headbutting?

Because the civility level here is declining into risky levels…

 

[FrogReaver]

Boring is, of course, relative. We're all welcome to ignore or abstract away what ever parts of play we don't find fun.

I've seen a few like @Faolyn say that not having fail forward or similar is boring. But that seems to presuppose there's no other way to generate non-boring content other than by bundling their generation with the player action resolution system.

A large part of the problem in these discussions is critics not taking the game as a whole. In D&D the character action resolution system isn't meant to be the driver of 'the non-boring'. Other parts of the game are meant for that.

And for narrativist games, their principles and the relationship of character details mandated to influence the resolution system also often get left out of the conversation.

I understand why this happens for the narratvist games, because in these discussions the only window most people have into narrativist games is what is shared and those other parts are rarely brought up at all in examples due to focusing on other parts and even if they are there there's usually not adequate focus on them.

I don't understand why this happens for D&D, something I think everyone here is at least familiar with (maybe not the latest versions, but still). Maybe the vast amount of often differing underlying assumptions of how mainstream d&d is played?

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm trying to describe what is necessary for a narrativist game.

My Definition - A narrativist game is structured in such a way as to produce fiction that revolves around certain player defined aspects of their characters chosen at character generation.

I think this rules out D&D module style play and many other typically D&D playstyles - play revolves around the module where player defined aspects may or may not ever come into play, and even if they do they may do so sporadically such that the fiction produced isn't revolving around those aspects.

The most common specific implementations of this involve
-Success with complication
-Player defined success stakes (constrained by player principles).
-Limited GM authority (only determining what happens on failure or for success with consequence and having principles further restrict what they can say).

But those implementations aren't necessary to have a narrativist game, even if they are typical of most games currently defined as Narrativist.

There's 3 ideas I want to explore
1) What other implementations of narrativist can there be?
2) Is D&D living sandbox a narrativist game?
3) What happens in a narrativist style game if players only ever define success stakes for their character's actions as similar to what would be the stakes for an action in a typical D&D game?

 

[pemerton]

the runes shouldn't change depending on who reads them, what they want them to say, or how skilled they are at reading them.

They don't.

The PC chooses to read them, and learns what they say. They haven't changed depending on who reads them.

If you mean the following - the shared fiction that is created at the table shouldn't change depending on what the players think is interesting to pursue as their characters - then I don't agree. Why shouldn't it?

 

[pemerton]

The important difference for us is that the player setting the stakes (deciding what is at stake).

Players do this routinely in all RPGs. A player, in D&D, who chooses to attack an Orc is taking their PC's life against the Orc's.

Consider a third case: the players are trying to assassinate Lord Farquaad. The system is free form so they get to define the move. They say: "we'll break into his manor. On a 10+, Lord Farquaad appears and we slay him. On a 7-9, he's there, but there are guards and we have to fight. On a 6-, he is out of town and the guards are there."

In this case, a successful roll (i) causes everyone to agree Lord Farquaad is dead and (ii) in the fiction the PC kills Lord Farquaad", as your orc case.

However, it differs from the orc case because the player was allowed to set the stakes of the roll.

No. It differs from the Orc case because of the way that it establishes backstory based on a roll.

It also differs from the runes case, because it is not clear what the relevant action declaration is.

It doesn't reference fixed aspects of the world, like the orc the GM described and its GM-facing stats, or that the GM wrote Lord Farquaad was out on campaign for the next month. It is a lottery where the players got to choose what to play for. Like the rune case.

You're just reiterating the issue of who gets to establish backstory.

 

[AlViking]

Then maybe not every lockpicking needs to be the result of a roll?

The only reason to roll in D&D is to resolve uncertainty. If it's a high level rogue and a cheap lock, no roll. Story, pacing, "stakes" don't matter.