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

[The Firebird]

Anthropology is a social science. Far as that goes, its not super easy to do experiments for some branches of sociology either, but people don't act like studies of it are invalid (they may act like the sources of data look dodgy, but they still are neither surveys nor experiments; at best they're interviews).

Another good limiting case is biography. Robert Caro's work on LBJ, for example, doesn't have "data" or "experiments" in the sense that some people desire. But it's exhaustively researched and detailed.

 

[Maxperson]

And in my experience, social contracts get rewritten whenever it is inconvenient for the person with power to follow them.

I've never seen that happen. As I said, they are stronger than written rules. If someone is willing to break the social contract, no rule is going to do anything to constrain them.

Guess who has all the power in the social contract you keep pushing?

Nobody. It's a group thing.

Hence: they are not binding at all, because it's a binding where one person, and ONLY one person, has both the key AND a forge to create NEW bindings for everyone else.

This is another incorrect statement. The DM has no ability to force people to play the game, let alone play it with the social rules of his choice.

We most certainly are. I don't see how that's even remotely relevant as evidence of the previous statement.

It's relevant, because it's what makes the social contract more important and stronger than any rules.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Precisely.

It would be like an employer, where the only response the employees can give to not getting paid for their agreed wages is just quitting the job and walking. No accountability. No restitution for unfulfilled promises. Nothing punitive at all, except "game ends."

And because we live in a world where groups starving for GMs are a dime a dozen, even the worst GMs can always find new groups.

That may not be quite literally true (I do think there's something to the argument that a lot more people are willing to take a walk in the days of VTTs than before it, but there are still people who find remote play remarkably unsatisfying) but I think its still true that the supply-to-demand ratio is far from even.

 

[Maxperson]

I am only a prophet by way of everyone else - I spew forth some amount of stuff, and some tiny faction of might turn out to be true, at which point I will be declared a genius and revered for generations, without consideration of all the crap I said that didn't come to pass.

Yep! After all, it's not like you work for The Simpsons.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Still doesn't make them data. They're self-selected, which means you can't separate them from their prompting.

Or, if you prefer, statistics require us to divide by (N-1), one less than the sample population. If your sample size is 1, that means dividing by zero. I think you can see why that might cause a few problems. Just a smidge.

The problem is this is a comparable case. After all, if you've got people who are perfectly happy with top-down GMing, they'll say so at least some of the time, right (accounting for the fact negative reactions are almost always more visible than positive)? But when the visibility of people unhappy with it is large enough, that suggests that, whether or not some of the latter exist, that populace is too large to be easily ignored.

So the sample size in cases I'm talking about are not small. They're just not rigorously selected, because functionally there's no way to do so. But I could absolutely have preformed the statistical test you discuss; it just would have had a considerable amount of wiggle in how seriously you should take the specific numbers.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Okay.

Anecdotes are such incredibly crappy data that they provide essentially zero actual information, and are instead 99.999% noise.

You do realize this entirely writes off any history not backed by archeology, right? I mean, I'm not going to say there aren't problems with history, but that seems an extreme position.

 

[Don Durito]

I feel that in some ways the tightness of a little of rules in many traditional games both restricts the GM heavily (and the players of course) and it is why you have the safety valve that ends up giving the GM the power to override any rules.

In a game with more narrative rules (I'm not going to say narrativist because there an awful lot of games out there these days like the 2d20 games that are somewhat hybrids), it's often the case that the results of abilites or action have to fit the fiction - this in itself means that the outcomes are often able to be more open while also avoiding the need to give the GM the safety valve of overriding the rules. (Which of course is not a good one because it frequently causes table acrimony when applied).

Like the old bag of rats trick with whirlwind attack and cleave in 3e. The defence against that in 3e was the GM saying no and overriding the rules. The defence against that in a more narrative game is that it makes no sense in the fiction (and because the rules are more open it doesn't make any sense to find a loophole to exploit - it would just be a player describing how their character murders a lot of rats.).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not me. I've had bad GMs, but their bad GMing was unrelated to the style of game.

Yeah, barring a few outliers, I don't think what I'm talking about relates to game style at all per se.

 

[Campbell]

I'd say early on I had a fair amount of play experiences I was not very fond of, but it was not because the GM or other players were bad, but because I was not getting what I wanted out of those games on a creative level. The experience on offer was not what I wanted, mostly because I took character more seriously than most of the people I played with, wanting more engagement on that level not just from the GM but also from the other players.

But I've been generally satisfied when I have found groups who put on emphasis on character and situations tailored to them. I've had good experiences as player playing fairly diverse games. My favorite games as a player are actually games like Legend of the Five Rings (Fifth Edition), Vampire and Exalted. I'm also quite fond of Pathfinder Second Edition. I like it when we all put effort into creating characters that are dynamic and fit together cohesively. I also like it when we all have a consistent frame of reference.

It's mostly as a GM that I heavily favor Narrativist games because I find world building to be a chore, am a talented improviser and get invested in characters more than setting. There are certain things I really do not like having on my plate that trad games put on GMs - world building, detailed prep, having to be a referee, etc. Apocalypse World showed me a way to run games in a way that felt natural yet still felt fair. The rules are also just a lot easier for me to handle usually.

I occasionally run more traditional games as well and enjoy it for different reasons, but it can be a lot of work running character focused trad games.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Another good limiting case is biography. Robert Caro's work on LBJ, for example, doesn't have "data" or "experiments" in the sense that some people desire. But it's exhaustively researched and detailed.

There's a reason people are much happier if they can double-check history records with archeology, but sometimes that's just not possible to a useful degree. Similarly, when trying to reconstruct what tribal groupings that did mostly low-impact settlement construction, most of what you're going to have is information passed down by their descendants (or even their enemies descendants) because you only have a limited amount to work with, usually the durable remnants of their tools and what that tells you about where they lived.