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

[AlViking]

That's odd - that MO has worked for me for over 40 years now.

All it needs is to set up the fiction such that it lets them roll up and bring in replacements for their dead so the party doesn't just whittle down to nothing.

As long as people know what they're getting into, I don't see an issue.

 

[pemerton]

Interesting. I actually have never come across a IRL person complaining about GM authority abuse.

And when I played in a club environment, I recruited players who were fed up with GM authority abuse. There were plenty of them about.

 

[pemerton]

Culture is in the end entirely our own creation (both in reality and in fiction) and thus we-as-worldbuilders can freely mess with it all we like.

And for someone who is reasonably well trained in the scholarly study and analysis of human cultures, this often produces utterly implausible and ridiculous fiction.

 

[pemerton]

What percentage of Narrativists came by their chosen preference via formative experiences with GM they didn't get along with to some degree, do you think? I'm hearing a lot of "I've had bad experiences with bad GMs" over and over from that "side".

What percentage of people who play soccer do you think chose that because of a bad experience at a cricket club?

What percentage of people who really enjoy backgammon do so because of a bad experience playing canasta?

Completely bizarre questions!

 

[AlViking]

Huh. Funny how this runs rather counter to your insistence of logical simulated worlds. Your world functions as a relation to the level of the pcs. Some events are off the table, not because they don’t make sense but because they would not be fun for the players.

:hrm:

You spent a lot of pages claiming that you would NEVER run your game this way. That everything is always a logical extension of the setting. Yet here you are saying that doing that makes you a terrible DM. So which is it?

When? When have I ever said anything like that? When planning I plan out options for things that the characters can handle. Since I run a sandbox world they could try to hunt down that ancient red dragon at level 1 but I'll make it obvious they will die. Once a session starts I run things as close to a simulation as I can. If you've read anything else into my statements that's on you.

 

[pemerton]

History is not a statistical science. It is our best attempt at assembling some idea of what happened in the past. That idea is often wrong, and any good historian will tell you that if you base your stuff only on secondhand information, it's bad history. Further, any good historian will tell you that even with extensive primary sources, we can still be led astray if all of those sources are biased for the same reason.

Finally, while the ravages of time do act as a selection process, that selection process is not nearly as biased as people volunteering information by self-selection. It IS biased, but the bias is (usually) much more random, which means the data we derive from it can be more meaningful, even if not absolutely so.

Archaeology helps us do the best history.

This claim isn't true at all, in my view. Trying to infer to social life from nothing but archaeological information is very fraught.

 

[Hussar]

I disagree.

What we're trying to simulate are observed results in the fiction that are consistent with themselves, and thus give the setting a foundation to build on. As such, we can - if we want - then insert narrated processes on a case by case basis that reasonably led to those results.

It's the same issue as being expected to show your work on a math exam. The actual process is irrelevant. All that matters is that you get the right answer and know how to replicate whatever process you used, even if you can't explain or show that process. (I ran into this all the time in school: I'd often consistently get the right answer but if asked to show my work I'd have no idea what thought processes led me to getting that answer, I just knew I could do it again if I had to)

What is means in the game context is that narration does most of the simulative work in terms of explaining process (there's a sharp stone that frayed through your rope) while the mechanics are left to produce the result (you fell down the cliff).

That is very much untrue. The reason you show your work on a math exam is because the answer is largely irrelevant. The point of the exam is to prove that you know the process for achieving that answer. The fact that your answer happened to be right could easily be a lucky guess. This is a problem teachers run into all the time when dealing with students and parents who completely misunderstand the point of testing. It's really frustrating.

Now, I agree that the narration does the simulative work. Totally agree. But, since your simulation isn't actually a simulation (you cannot show your work), then your system isn't a simulation. It's just a series of "the DM makes stuff up". Your "reasonably" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Basically, a simulationist system that provides no actual process information is just Calvinball. It's "cops and robbers" with a thin layer of paint.

And, to prove this, I would point to every single actual simulationist leaning system out there - GURPS, Warhammer Fantasy, Palladium systems, Role Master - which tell me that you are wrong. If it was perfectly fine for simulationist systems to not inform the narrative, why does every single sim system in existence disagree with you?

 

[Divine2021]

Decided to see what people could possible be talking about on page 1794, and yes, it is as silly as I thought.

 

[Hussar]

Sorry for cutting in. I've been following this thread for a while, and I am intrigued by what you are sharing and I'd like to understand better. I've been throwing around the term "simulation" left and right without much thinking.

Is this definition of simulation you are using a widely accepted one in the context of TTRPG, or a broader context? Would you mind pointing me to a source? Apologies if the source was already provided—it's really hard to search through these posts.

I would think that it's pretty much widely accepted, full stop because that's what simulationist systems are.

Again, as I just posted to @Lanefan, every single sim-leaning system in the history of the hobby says that the mechanics inform the narrative. The mechanics provide some (doesn't mean all or every or perfect, just some) kernel of information to the table about how the result was achieved.

The only exception to this so far has been FKR, which substitutes an expert in the field in lieu of mechanics.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What percentage of people who play soccer do you think chose that because of a bad experience at a cricket club?

What percentage of people who really enjoy backgammon do so because of a bad experience playing canasta?

Completely bizarre questions!

Given the amount of complaining about trad GMs (and trad GM playstyles) from the Narrativists on this thread, I really don't find my question all that bizarre.