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

robertsconley · Wednesday at 4:50 PM

pemerton said:
Nothing wrong for whom? I can tell you that I think "nothing happens" is pretty unexciting. If I sit down to play a classic dungeon crawl, I expect some of that sort of thing. But it's also why I don't sit down to play classic dungeon crawls very often.

He’s referring to the consequences of failure, as in, “Nothing happens when you fail to pick the lock,” not “We’re just standing around doing nothing.”

All the games you mentioned earlier, Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Stonetop, Burning Wheel, Torchbearer, also handle failure. But as you yourself just acknowledged, these games share the same core trait with OD&D: the narrative emerges from unfolding events.

So I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. It doesn’t really relate to what @Lanefan was discussing. The lock not being picked is itself an event that changes the situation, another beat in the unfolding narrative.

Micah Sweet · Wednesday at 4:51 PM

pemerton said:
In case it needs saying, RPGs like Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Stonetop, Burning Wheel and Torchbearer don't involve a story that is authored in advance. In those RPGs, the narrative emerges from the unfolding events of the campaign.

With lots of help from the system and espoused design philosophy to make sure the unfolding events are exciting and character-defining.

AnotherGuy · Wednesday at 4:51 PM

pemerton said:
And I would say that Burning Wheel tends to produce far more grounded RPGing than most D&D play that I am familiar with. For a host of reasons, but some of those are because BW is closer to RuneQuest than D&D in the way that PCs are expressed and actions are resolved.

I'm not familiar with RuneQuest but can you please provide an example by what you believe is more grounded about the PC expression or action resolution in RQ? I suspect it may be a lower magic setting too than D&D.

pemerton · Wednesday at 4:52 PM

Thomas Shey said:
The focus on Complication as a virtue seemed present in both Monster of the Week and Monsterhearts to my reading, and if I understood your post you indicate these are in two different branches. Did I misread here?

There is no misreading. @Campbell is noting that Monsterhearts is intended to support narrativist play, whereas Monster of the Week is intended to support genre emulation, either GM-driven or perhaps GM-player collaboration. (In the lexicion that gave us "narrativist", it would probably be labelled "high concept simulationist". Independently of that lexicon, MotW can be seen to be closer to Fate than to AW in the sort of RPGing it supports.)

Micah Sweet · Wednesday at 4:53 PM

pemerton said:
Who do you think this is disagreeing with?

Anyone who suggests that a GM's job is to facilitate the fun of others above all other concerns, and it's a problem if they need more than that to have fun themselves.

robertsconley · Wednesday at 4:53 PM

pemerton said:
Likewise in Apocalypse World - if no player-side move is triggered, then the GM makes a move, by default a soft one.

But eventually a player will declare an action that triggers a player-side move, if for no other reason than because that is how players can try and seize control and achieve finality.

Much as how protagonists in fiction - especially genre fiction - end up doing things that generate higher-stakes results.

So, just like in my Living World sandbox campaigns, where I determine or roll for how the world is in motion. Eventually, the players take action in response, and the situation escalates or shifts, because that’s how they control or shape outcomes.

Thomas Shey · Wednesday at 4:55 PM

Micah Sweet said:
Since this is the system in use in most traditional RPGs, including D&D, I'm not sure how you can legitimately claim "most" people see it as a waste of time.

Because I've seen seen plenty of people treat it as so? That doesn't mean they're going to go to the trouble of addressing it, or don't think its serving other purposes. But I can promise I've never seen and rarely heard of people who think repeated failed search rolls are are either interesting or worthwhile.

Micah Sweet · Wednesday at 4:55 PM

robertsconley said:
Noted. Those are precisely the same type of RPGs as OD&D. In both, the narrative emerges from the unfolding events of the campaign.

The sarcasm here is subtle, but I think I see it.

AlViking · Wednesday at 4:57 PM

Campbell said:
I believe in doing what you want to do without hesitation and finding the people you want to play with. It's what I have done in this space for 20+ years. The "some developers are like corvids" line is unnecessary. You do not need to accuse others who choose different paths of following trends without thought to make your point.

I'm also a software engineer and I understand that those who choose different technologies simply have different priorities.

That wasn't meant to be an accusation of any kind against people who like variety in games, sorry if it sounded like it was.

But I have seen plenty of times with things like new Javascript libraries* where people jumped on it with little or no justification. I know one company that was changing over all of it's web development to something new every two years on average for a decade.

*like the time we had to use Knockout.js even though it was a business application and the whole justification was that you could do calculations on the form without sending data to the server. Which had no applicable use case.

Micah Sweet · Wednesday at 4:57 PM

pemerton said:
The evidence of this thread is that, for some posters at least, it is easier to apply a heuristic of the GM decides if there are consequences than the GM, guided by the table, ascertains if something is at stake relative to some player-determined priority for their character.

I certainly find it an easier heuristic to apply to my play.

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

robertsconley

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