Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
Well clearly the god in this case is a jerk, but I can certainly see the entertainment value he would bring to a setting
D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.
- Thread starter Reynard
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Well clearly the god in this case is a jerk, but I can certainly see the entertainment value he would bring to a setting
So, here is a typical sequence of social interactions from my TB2e game. It began when (in the fiction) the PCs were taken by their captors from the prison cell beneath the Moathouse to meet Lareth the Beautiful (in this campaign, a Half-Elf rather than a human); at the table, this involved free narration by me, probably responding to a few player questions about the environment, before narrating the opening of the meeting with Lareth:
The sequence of events involved both an extended conflict resolution - the Convince conflict - as well as the subsequent single opposed checks, involving the two Elven PCs (Telemere and Fea-bella).
The actual play doesn't record everything that was actually said by the players for their PCs, nor by me for Lareth. Still, I hope you can see why - given that this is the sort of thing I think of when I think of social conflict resolution - you can see why I took your account to be something of a caricature.
Or to put the same point in a slightly different way: I don't doubt that your experience of skills-based social resolution is as you describe it is true - that is, fiction-free dice rolling. But I don't understand why you would assume that those of us who talk about social resolution systems in these threads have that sort of thing in mind.
robertsconley
Adventurer
That's what the Initial Context is for. The group as a whole has some information; each player has their own set of information. Together, this forms the Initial Context, which allows the group to figure out what they want to do at the start of Session 1.
A general principle of my campaign is that nothing exists in a vacuum, including the players themselves. So, I work with them to figure out what their characters were doing prior to the start of the campaign.
This blog post from 2011 explains some of the process that goes into creating the Initial Context.
How to manage a sandbox campaign: The pre-game
Last post I mention three broad areas on managing sandbox campaigns. The pre-game, the bag of stuff, and world in motion. The pre-game is cr...
batintheattic.blogspot.com
That is not how works out in my campaigns. I recommend reading this blog spot of mine
Sandpits to watch out for in your Sandbox.
Zachary talks about 'Organic Boundaries' here . I been running free-ranging campaigns for a while and learned to avoid a few of the sandpits...
batintheattic.blogspot.com
The short answer: Things don't exist in a vacuum; they cause ripples. Meaning, as the players travel, they will hear things. And some of them will be of interest, and they will elect to focus on what they just discovered.
So I am quoting you in reverse to build up to the final point. So there is a Initial Context that players know and can use to start adventuring. But as the campaign progresses World in Motion comes into play. Above, I talk about what happens they travel. The same things happen as time progresses in the campaign. Instead of drops and ripples that are spaced across the landscape, there are drops and ripples spaced across time. And when those ripples wash over the players, they will hear of them, and if they are interested, it becomes a basis for more adventures.
Also to be clear by the middle of the campaign many of these drops and ripples that spread through time are the result of what the players have done earlier in the campaign as a result of NPCs changing their goals and plans.
To get a better idea of how this looks, I suggest reading this campaign log by one of my players, starting at the post I linked, where they finally got out from under a civil war that erupted and started pursuing rumors about the dragon Pan Caulderax.
Majestic Wilderlands - Weekend at Bryny's - Gaming Ballistic
We picked up after a lot of time off. The last time I played, it was about five minutes and “oh, by the way, your friends managed to salvage the +2 Plate Armor,” so yay! We are apparently saddled with a young lady and her mother as a result of some action with some mercenaries. After...
gamingballistic.com
mamba
Legend
but a more probable obstacle would limit the actions in a very similar way, see the cave-in vs gelatinous cube migration. I understand that you see a difference there while I do not, guess we have to leave it at that. I agree that neither should become a frequent occurrence as otherwise things do start to look a little railroad-y, but to me it is the frequency of it more than how plausible I consider the one case to be (although in the aggregate highly implausible cases raise the alarm sooner than probable ones, my threshold is still higher than one though).
I guess we mean similar things, what I termed 'initial trust' is your 'acceptance', we agree that trust needs to be maintained or gets lost (or never established in your case)
I said nothing about 'or you are out of here', that is certainly not how I would handle it. I would ask to postpone it until after the session unless it is very important that the issue is addressed right away - but it then better be important too, not because I will kick you out if it isn't, but because it could and should have waited otherwise
I would assume at a minimum an email exchange should be possible, if that has not worked in the past then you do not really have a choice but to bring it up during the session
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Respect must also be earned. Respect takes much longer to earn than basic trust, because you have to meet a much higher bar. That is, trust requires shows of trustworthiness. (Hence why, as I said, initial allowance is necessary--you must give someone the opportunity to show trustworthiness in order to establish basic trust. Higher degrees of trust are established by longer sustained periods of trustworthiness.) Earning respect requires shows of excellence in one form or another, sustained over a long enough period to be clearly the result of character, effort, skill, or knowledge, not just a random fluke or run of good fortune.
Because, by your standard, this means you should 100% perfectly trust anything any GM ever does no matter what, even if you've never met them before and know literally nothing at all about them except the campaign description they wrote. I'm pretty sure that you would not instantly and infinitely trust such a person, even "infinitely" within the bounds of running a campaign.
Nobody--nobody--inherently deserves trust. Not even a GM offering to run a game.
Now, this doesn't mean people should start setting traps--which they will usually call "tests"--to try to force someone to prove their trustworthiness. That is a recipe for utter failure on both ends, and just makes the trap-setter/test-giver paranoid and incapable of forming meaningful connections with others. But it does mean that nobody, not even a GM offering to run a game for others, can just blithely act like the players automatically trust everything they do all the time forever--which is precisely what comes from the presumption that the GM is and must be trusted.
Trust is earned. Not by passing tests, but by demonstrating trustworthiness. Violating that trust means it's lost--often permanently, and even when it can be regained, it is usually a painfully slow process.
And putting all (generic) your information and decisions in a black box and then telling me "just trust me, bro!" isn't the way to earn trust. It is, in fact, one of the best ways to make me wonder if I should have trusted (generic) you in the first place.
mamba
Legend
I agree, my interpretation of 'he does not drink alcohol' was more along the lines of, you cannot sweet-talk him into drinking alcohol, not you can threaten to kill his family and he still won't
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
I don't think there is anything wrong with this system, I still think my point is I get more immersed in freeform RP around these kinds of things (and I can see you had RP here, I just mean that is the only thing I want to be a consideration). But like I said, I still use social rules because most people seem to want them. The only time I am a stickler for this these days is when I play Ravenloft. I only do 2E now for that, and it is because I find it really impacts mood and feel for me.
I didn't assume that. Rolling came up in the conversation with @hawkeyefan. You've pointed out to me many times you use systems that don't do this. But the focus at the moment of that discussion for me was contrasting skill rolls and free form RP. Keep in mind, I am not saying you don't have RP with skill based resolution either. My point was it trips me up. There is a tendency for some players, sometimes entire groups, to just say "I bluff" and roll. I understand abundantly that isn't how the mechanic works, as I have pointed this out to people during games. But it is a bigger issue than role-play being sidestepped, to me it feels like even when it is happening, it undermines it. And it is basically because I don't see the need for a mechanic here. I can say my thing in character, the GM can respond to it. I don't mind light systems. Reaction rolls don't really bother me for example, and I like social systems that inform RP (like the Etiquette roll in 2E).
Keep in mind too, this was deep into a long discussion on sandbox and agency, and we hit on this one example of a guard who can't be bribed. I even said, not every sandbox would eschew social mechanics, but I felt it was generally widely accepted in sandboxes that the GM ought to have authority over NPC personality traits (including strong ones that could even reach a level of "can't be bribed", "Won't cheat on wife"). And so the question was more about whether any procedure or mechanic ought to be able to shift that or not. But we were just barely keeping up with each other because the discussion was moving so fast. So I wasn't intentionally trying to exclude all the other ways this could be handled. I was trying to focus on two very clear contrasting approaches that each came up
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
For me, the difference is that acceptance/allowance/etc. (I've used more than one term in the thread, my apologies!) has an expiration date, while trust does not. That is, acceptance/allowance is there to get the ball rolling, to provide that initial space so that actual trust can be established. If it isn't established within some reasonable period of time, the acceptance/allowance dries up, and you move on with your life rather than continuing this relationship, whatever that relationship might be (this applies to anything, not just the player/GM relationship.)
Further, acceptance/allowance/etc. can't really be "violated" per se, since it's a gift, not something earned. Trust absolutely can be violated, and once it has been, it's probably been lost forever. Certainly with trust within the TTRPG space, once it's been lost there's very little reason to bother trying to rebuild it; the amount of time it would take and the amount of distrustful suspicions in the meantime would likely poison any attempted gaming. Even when it isn't lost forever, rebuilding trust takes dramatically longer than building it the first time.
Others certainly have, and the authoritative air is certainly thick whenever this kind of stuff comes up. "My way or the highway"-ism is rampant among folks who talk about "trust the GM" etc.
I certainly agree that making mountains out of molehills is a problem, and if a player does that too often, we're going to need to have a talk.
Both as a player and a GM, I fully agree these things are possible.
The problem is, that possibility almost never actually manifests. With nearly every player I've worked with, I as GM have had to be the one pushing things forward on "off" days. With nearly every GM I've worked with, their prep time and personal lives (entirely justifiably!) take up most of their attention, and even reasonable prompting at regular intervals often does not produce results...until a session finally comes around anyway.
And, again, this is even with GMs (and players!) that I have genuinely, unreservedly liked and been happy to work with. This isn't bad GMs. It isn't even mediocre GMs. It's the vast majority of GMs, regardless of skill level or intentions, in my experience.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
As with far, far too many things, I find that the issue isn't the approach itself. It is the unfamiliarity of the approach.
You are used to doing all of these things exclusively through freeform. So anything that isn't freeform automatically feels weird, because it is unfamiliar.
The problem is the unfamiliarity, not the approach itself. And that, that exact thing, "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it"...
is the exhausting conservatism of D&D fans, per the thread topic.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Except that well-constructed mechanics are specifically a thing IN ORDER TO get people on the same page.
Like...that's one of the most important functions of rules. To make sure everyone is on the same page.
It's why we have many, precise and specific, rules for combat. One of the places where it would be very easily for people to not be on the same page.
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