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

Thomas Shey · Tuesday at 3:49 PM

FrozenNorth said:
I get the fact that you’re agreeing with me here, but it does seem like the line is pretty clear cut.

I mean, I specifically said « a town isn’t an encounter » and you had to change the premise to « generating a ´village´ » to make it halfway plausible as an encounter.

It was an example of where I think the line gets fuzzy. Some people would probably find the village-as-encounter odd too.

AlViking · Tuesday at 3:50 PM

Umbran said:
I suppose it is a viable approach, so long as it doesn't violate established narrative. If the Great Dragon has been plaguing the lands for a century, or Stradh the Vampire Lord is making an appearance, ratcheting down to not slaughter a 1st level party would not make much sense.

But, if the PCs go after the menacing Cult of Blargh that is hiding in the Foamy Hills... do I really care if they are powered up or down to be a challenge for a 6th or 10th level party? I don't think I do.

My setting, faction, NPC or even regional notes are not set in stone until they're surfaced during play so I agree. Even if I have something marked as dangerous it could always be an old school Scooby-Doo mystery when the ghost was really Mr. Jenkins the real estate agent. I generally try to avoid that though unless I've dropped hints that a threat may be overblown. Meanwhile there are a lot of blank spaces on my map with only vague rumors and even if there was a major threat somewhere 50 years ago it doesn't mean it's still there.

TwoSix · Tuesday at 3:54 PM

AlViking said:
Then I'd disagree. I don't use maps or a matrix and I don't remember ever random encounters, although there may be some randomness as to whether encounters happen or not. Yet my campaigns are very player driven if the group wants, sounds like you're calling your personal preferences the one true way.

It's fine to disagree. But I'm not calling anything the "one true way", I'm defining my own usage of the terms. Which I said myriad times in that post. Seriously, read all the words in my post.

I (notice the "I" there, it's very important) think that there are important distinctions between "player-driven" and a "sandbox". I would say that while "player-driven" is a necessary component of a sandbox game, NOT ALL "player-driven" games are sandboxes.

As an example, I (again, this is just me) have run 2 games relatively recently. Both were "player-driven", becuase I had no overarching plot or any expectation of how the game would play out. But one was a "sandbox" (how I view the word as being defined) because I had a pre-defined map with lots of encounters, the other was not a "sandbox" because I improved challenges based on the character goals with no reference to geography or a map.

Snarf Zagyg · Tuesday at 3:54 PM

TwoSix said:
Hey, I'm reasonable a solid 70, maybe 75% of the time.

And I'm correct one hundred and crazy percent of the time!

Eh, it's not that I'm right. It's more about the wrongness of others.

TwoSix · Tuesday at 4:01 PM

Thomas Shey said:
Some people just don't want that from their game experience. Its not fundamentally any different than why some people don't want to engage with really dark settings, or honestly, either one from the fiction they absorb.

Oh, for sure. I've run into people with those play priorities before, it's just completely antithetical as to how I play. Fundamentally, I'm playing to generate conflict (in the narrative, not table conflict!), not to have my character succeed. "Play your character like a stolen car" was something I was doing decades before I saw that idea codified.

zakael19 · Tuesday at 4:08 PM

AlViking said:
If that kind of thing is something your party enjoys, which is great, I don't see that it has much to do with having played a different game system. It's certainly similar in tone to things I've tried over the years in D&D. It's just general advice on setting mood and tone that applies to all games and sounds an awful lot like some of the advice from the DMG and various other sources I've read over the years.

So your original comment was struggling with seeing how these “other games” can hit the same exploration notes as D&D. While I haven’t seen scene framing and recommendations like this show up apart from the 2024 DMG and the 4e one which I only read recently, I’m glad that you can see how you can get a similar feeling of exploring the wilds in something like Dungeon World and many other non-D&D games.

AlViking · Tuesday at 4:33 PM

zakael19 said:
So your original comment was struggling with seeing how these “other games” can hit the same exploration notes as D&D. While I haven’t seen scene framing and recommendations like this show up apart from the 2024 DMG and the 4e one which I only read recently, I’m glad that you can see how you can get a similar feeling of exploring the wilds in something like Dungeon World and many other non-D&D games.

I said nothing about whether or not other games can hit the same exploration notes. I acknowledge that apples and baseballs are both roughly spherical and similar size and weight. They can both be thrown. I acknowledge that Risk and Axis and Allies are both about war. They're both board games that have the world split into regions and conflicts are resolved by rolls of the dice.

Same with narrative games. They have superficial similarities and at a 10,000 foot level share some things in common. But people constantly interject how narrative games work into D&D specific threads and I don't see the point. What, specifically, does it add that hasn't already been said from the perspective of D&D or similar traditional games? I talk about how I set up scenes, how I run NPCs, how I give people choices on the direction of the campaign, how I have varied encounters that frequently don't involve or can avoid combat.

It's like going onto a BitD thread and talking about how D&D is so much better because we track HP, AC, spells and saves so we have more tactical combat, how it's so much better to have detailed inventory because it forces people to plan ahead. The goals of the games are just different and other than a handful of similarities which apply to virtually all RPGs I don't see that there's anything in common.

zakael19 · Tuesday at 4:44 PM

AlViking said:
I said nothing about whether or not other games can hit the same exploration notes. I acknowledge that apples and baseballs are both roughly spherical and similar size and weight. They can both be thrown. I acknowledge that Risk and Axis and Allies are both about war. They're both board games that have the world split into regions and conflicts are resolved by rolls of the dice.

Same with narrative games. They have superficial similarities and at a 10,000 foot level share some things in common. But people constantly interject how narrative games work into D&D specific threads and I don't see the point. What, specifically, does it add that hasn't already been said from the perspective of D&D or similar traditional games? I talk about how I set up scenes, how I run NPCs, how I give people choices on the direction of the campaign, how I have varied encounters that frequently don't involve or can avoid combat.

It's like going onto a BitD thread and talking about how D&D is so much better because we track HP, AC, spells and saves so we have more tactical combat, how it's so much better to have detailed inventory because it forces people to plan ahead. The goals of the games are just different and other than a handful of similarities which apply to virtually all RPGs I don't see that there's anything in common.

You said:

I don't see much of a connection between the approach of narrative games (and I've never had a chance to play FATE, perhaps it was a bad example) and D&D and similar games. Narrative games seem to be very reactionary, entirely focused on the character while D&D is focused on adventure - even if the adventures are chosen by the players in a sandbox. I don't know or care about TIBFs of my player's characters, we tried to lean into it a bit when 5e came out but it just felt artificial to us. Which, I mean I know the whole game is artificial but it just seemed unnecessary. It was better for the players to just discuss and chose direction in character, resolve or talk about their character through RP rather than have some meta-framing being taken into consideration.

Which isn't a great explanation, I just feel like we're comparing apples and baseballs when we discuss different approaches.

I was providing an example of how narrative games can be focused on adventure. The core loop of Stonetop is Expedition -> Homefront -> time pass (maybe) -> Expedition. It’s explicitly an adventure based game.

The emphasis on why you go on adventures may be somewhat different, but that’s not really all that far from getting a strong initial hook & character backstory buy in is it?

If you’re repudiating even that, then again - you seem a lot more conservative in play then my experience of 5e.

Faolyn · Tuesday at 4:45 PM

Lanefan said:
Though they each didn't want to play a Viking (at least to start with), how interested were those players in playing in a Norse-based setting and culture? Maybe the setting appealed more than the actual playing of a Viking character. Or, is it possible each thought the others would all be playing Vikings and therefore they could try something different?

It's kind of the same as starting a D&D campaign in faux-ancient Greece and the players roll up a Hobbit, two Dwarves, an Elf and a Gnome. They're still going to be starting out in the ancient-Greek culture and setting, and the players will have to figure out how to incorporate an entirely non-Human party into that very Human-centric culture without getting run outta town.

The GM, who is presumably using a system that has nonhuman options, should have figured out how they work in the setting in the first place. You can have a faux Ancient Greece setting and still have nonhumans integrated in it.p (the faux-Spartans were actually elves or orcs or whatever, etc). If you were going for historical Ancient Greece, you should have been clearer on the no nonhumans, no magic, etc. up front.

Campbell · Tuesday at 4:46 PM

AlViking said:
I said nothing about whether or not other games can hit the same exploration notes. I acknowledge that apples and baseballs are both roughly spherical and similar size and weight. They can both be thrown. I acknowledge that Risk and Axis and Allies are both about war. They're both board games that have the world split into regions and conflicts are resolved by rolls of the dice.

Same with narrative games. They have superficial similarities and at a 10,000 foot level share some things in common. But people constantly interject how narrative games work into D&D specific threads and I don't see the point. What, specifically, does it add that hasn't already been said from the perspective of D&D or similar traditional games? I talk about how I set up scenes, how I run NPCs, how I give people choices on the direction of the campaign, how I have varied encounters that frequently don't involve or can avoid combat.

It's like going onto a BitD thread and talking about how D&D is so much better because we track HP, AC, spells and saves so we have more tactical combat, how it's so much better to have detailed inventory because it forces people to plan ahead. The goals of the games are just different and other than a handful of similarities which apply to virtually all RPGs I don't see that there's anything in common.

Within the context of this thread people were making points about roleplaying games in general (that is what brought me to this thread personally and usually what brings me to these threads). If we're going to speak about roleplaying games (and how they are structured or should be structured on a broader level) than that means we're also talking about:

Chronicles of Darkness
FATE
Apocalypse World
Into the Odd
Mouseguard
Dune 2d20
Edge of the Empire
Worlds Without Number
Daggerheart
Tales of Xadia (Cortex Dragon Prince game)

All of these are roleplaying games and are structured as differently from one another as they are from AD&D. If we are bringing the conversation beyond the scope of D&D, then we should bring it beyond the scope of D&D. If we are not, then we should probably not make points that expand beyond that or specifically point to other sorts of games. We should likely not also talk about things that cannot be done in the medium or make comparative claims to other sorts of play.

It's not about saying this thing is better or not. It's about accurately representing how various games actually function.

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

Thomas Shey

Legend

AlViking

Hero

TwoSix

Everyone's literal second-favorite poster

Snarf Zagyg

Notorious Liquefactionist

TwoSix

Everyone's literal second-favorite poster

zakael19

Hero

AlViking

Hero

zakael19

Hero

Faolyn

(she/her)

Campbell

Relaxed Intensity

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