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

Lanefan · Tuesday at 9:08 PM

Faolyn said:
I never said that at all. I clearly said that the dragon may not notice the party. I never said it wouldn’t kill the party.

But having the dragon instantly spot the party and attack is the opposite of having the world not revolve around the PCs.

You've also several times suggested that the DM could or even should adjust the threats in a given location to suit the party level, which IMO fights against the idea of a setting independent of the PCs.

In an independent setting what's there is what's there, without regard to whether it's a 1st-level or 15th-level party arriving on the scene.

Lanefan · Tuesday at 9:11 PM

AbdulAlhazred said:
Eh, there's both more and less differences than you imagine. Playing AW is related to playing 5e as MLB is to high school baseball, they're essentially the same activities, with somewhat different rules and rather different goals and context. It's absolutely possible to compare and contrast.

AW is the major leagues while 5e is high school ball?

Yeah, like that's not going to put some noses out of joint...

Pedantic · Tuesday at 9:19 PM

FrozenNorth said:
I think this is a very good point and it gets at an issue I had with a D&D adjacent game, PF2. In PF2, you can make a Medicine roll which takes 10 minutes, to heal damage. You can also make a Crafting roll, which takes 10 minutes, to repair damage to your shield. In both cases, you can spam the rolls until you heal/repair your gear completely. Even on a critical failure, you do minor damage that can be fixed by rolling again.

There are game structures that disincentivize hand waving the rolls (specific feats that allow you to « take 10 » on the roll and feats that reduce the cooldown on the roll).

The effect is that unless there is a pressing reason NOT to take the time to heal up between fights (non-existent in the modules I’ve seen), after ever fight pacing grinds to a halt while the PC trained in Medicine rolls to heal up all the characters and PCs roll to repair their equipment.

It’s rolls without stakes which serves only to slow down the game with busywork.

I can't help but think PF2 really didn't understand the value of defaulting mechanics like Take 10, I suspect largely as a result of writing generic scaling difficulties into skill resolution. There's nothing wrong with riskless mechanics, but it's obviously bad to make them time consuming to deploy at the table. Locking them behind feats is a mistake.

hawkeyefan · Tuesday at 9:19 PM

AlViking said:
I'm not saying the games can't have similarities. I made no comment on how other games may or may not work. I don't see why people have to repeatedly and constantly bring narrative games into a D&D discussion without even trying to show how it could be useful for a D&D DM.

I think that's what a lot of this thread has been about, when not getting sidetracked into arguments about definition and so on.

I'll offer a piece of advice or guidance that I learned more from the narrativist side of the hobby than the trad side... as a GM, make all the dice rolls in the open and share all Target Numbers or Difficulty Classes with the players before rolling. Just put everything out there in the open. Make the entire process transparent to the players. It's far more beneficial to play than keeping things hidden.

Another recent one that's been mentioned (though maybe in slightly different terms) is "the result of a roll should never be 'nothing happens'". I very much agree with this... keep things active and moving. Let things develop rather than staying the same. Otherwise, don't pick up the dice.

Another I really like is from Blades in the Dark, and it is "Keep the meta channel open". Here's what it says below:
When you portray and NPC, tell the players things that are going unsaid. Invite them to ask their gather information questions to dig deeper. The characters have a broad spectrum of senses and intuitions to bring to bear in the fiction; the players have only the narrow channel of your few words. Help them out by sharing what they might suspect, intuit, feel, and predict.

I expect that each of these would meet with resistance from more conservative minded folks, but I think they're great bits of advice from other games that have greatly enhanced by GMing of D&D and similar games.

AbdulAlhazred · Tuesday at 9:38 PM

AlViking said:
But that just means we have different ways of expressing goals of the game and likely different goals. If I'm climbing a significantly tall cliff I may need more than one roll but that just means I'm closer to achieving my goal of getting to the top of the cliff. My ultimate goal is to achieve something else - retrieve the golden eagle egg for the noble so he can replace his prize bird or whatever.

You can't really compare the two directly that doesn't mean that in D&D people are rolling dice for no reason. They're just rolling them for different reasons. But rolling dice should always be a step in moving forward, or at least not moving backwards.

If anyone running DW is moving you backwards on a 7+, they're not following the rules. Here's the difference though, 7+ advances the fiction in a direction coincident with your goal, though it will not always be exactly what you were trying to do, and 7-9 will let the GM say something unfavorable to you. This might not even be directly related to the task.

But 6- also can be any logically possible outcome, just not one that is good for you.

Umbran · Tuesday at 9:38 PM

AbdulAlhazred said:
Why the insecurity?

Mod Note:
Please don't try to make the discussion about the person you are speaking with - that's a road to egos getting in the way, and people being insulted.

Please stick to the substance, not your internet-mind-reading take on the mental state of others.

AlViking · Tuesday at 9:47 PM

Lanefan said:
Question: if you don't use maps then how do the players know or remember what is where in relation to what? For example, is Karnos (city) north or west of Torcha (another city), what type of terrain lies between them, and how long does it likely take to get from one to the other?

Or do the players just draw their own maps from your descriptions?

That wasn't clear, I don't use detailed maps or hex crawls. I have a continent level map and a high level map for some of my larger cities. But I don't do location based adventures per se, if they decide to track down a mysterious disease in a remote village, oftentimes I'll just describe where the village is. If it's through dangerous areas we'll discuss what precautions they're taking but until there's an encounter (some planned, some just random depending on precautions) I'll just narrate it.

Even if exploring ruins, I'll frequently just have grid lines form when it's necessary because of a trap and narrate the exploration based on, again, how careful they're being or if they're taking precautions. It's kind of like doing theater of the mind, except for travel and exploration.

Umbran · Tuesday at 10:03 PM

Micah Sweet said:
My apologies then. You appeared to suggest narrative as the core throughput of all RPG play, and I very much disagree with that.

Unless you engage in play in which effect does not follow cause, or characters don't have even half-cogent reasons for their actions, the result is coherent narrative. "Coherent," doesn't mean, "esthetically pleasing," or something. It just means that it makes some basic sense as a series of events.

AlViking · Tuesday at 10:07 PM

hawkeyefan said:
I think that's what a lot of this thread has been about, when not getting sidetracked into arguments about definition and so on.

I'll offer a piece of advice or guidance that I learned more from the narrativist side of the hobby than the trad side... as a GM, make all the dice rolls in the open and share all Target Numbers or Difficulty Classes with the players before rolling. Just put everything out there in the open. Make the entire process transparent to the players. It's far more beneficial to play than keeping things hidden.

Another recent one that's been mentioned (though maybe in slightly different terms) is "the result of a roll should never be 'nothing happens'". I very much agree with this... keep things active and moving. Let things develop rather than staying the same. Otherwise, don't pick up the dice.

Another I really like is from Blades in the Dark, and it is "Keep the meta channel open". Here's what it says below:
When you portray and NPC, tell the players things that are going unsaid. Invite them to ask their gather information questions to dig deeper. The characters have a broad spectrum of senses and intuitions to bring to bear in the fiction; the players have only the narrow channel of your few words. Help them out by sharing what they might suspect, intuit, feel, and predict.

I expect that each of these would meet with resistance from more conservative minded folks, but I think they're great bits of advice from other games that have greatly enhanced by GMing of D&D and similar games.

All I can say is that I disagree with pretty much all of that advice. I want people guessing, sometimes an insight check doesn't change anything. I'll tell people on a pretty regular basis information I think they're character would know, but it's only because I think they're character would know. If I think they might know something there's a roll and it may or may not change anything.

If that makes me "conservative" in your opinion that's both holier than though and has nothing to do with why I handle things the way I do. It's what my players enjoy and what I enjoy when playing.

AlViking · Tuesday at 10:07 PM

AbdulAlhazred said:
If anyone running DW is moving you backwards on a 7+, they're not following the rules. Here's the difference though, 7+ advances the fiction in a direction coincident with your goal, though it will not always be exactly what you were trying to do, and 7-9 will let the GM say something unfavorable to you. This might not even be directly related to the task.

But 6- also can be any logically possible outcome, just not one that is good for you.

I was discussing D&D, not DW.

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

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