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

zakael19 said:

A quiet moment where a character brings another one a cup of tea they made just for them, and has a little chat about not being afraid of these new powers is interesting, even if it's very non-action!

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Absolutely. It likely will involve something important between or to the characters, and so it's likely interesting to explore that.

Like, the lack of explosions or swordplay doesn't make something uninteresting.

zakael19 said:

I posted over in the Daggerheart(+) thread about how the list of "types of questions" to ask that Blades presents under the larger heading of "Ask Questions" is probably one of the single most useful bits of GMing advice I've personally taken onboard. Like, I'd just never thought to ask players a lot of those things about their characters as we went about play. Half the delight is how open-ended stuff like that is, toss a question out there and get surprised and delighted by where people take it.

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"Ask questions and build on the answers" is definitely great advice. I think it's one of the great elements about games like Blades or Stonetop. It often is misunderstood to be "grant full authorial control to players", but I think it's something that can easily be ported over to D&D, as well.

Micah Sweet said:

Claiming that some element of playstyle is objectively best like this is going to get pushback. At least from me.

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Do you want your players to sit through stretches of play that they'd find boring? Do you want them to merely tolerate much of the game rather than being engaged by it?

Micah Sweet said:

Whereas I feel the GM should be allowing the players to make whatever decisions they want, interesting or otherwise, that are within the power of their PCs to make.

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Really? Earlier you said that you as GM aren't there just to enable the players' fun. This comment here would seem to potentially conflict with that.

I am all for the players doing whatever they want... but if it's aimless wandering or just in-character fluff with no real stakes or pathos, then I'm only gonna tolerate it so long before I move things along.

zakael19 said:

This is more or less how the Threat Roll in Blades Deep Cuts works. You're going along, stating what your character is doing. Like Blades was always supposed to do, where an obstacle is telegraphed or evident the GM states what you'll get (Effect); but then also clearly states what the Risk is. Player says how they'll deal with the risk (Threat), and that's what you're resolving: how well do you avoid the badness.

This significantly reduces the consequence snowball beyond what's already stated, and emphasizes the cost of achieving your goals as the primary test of play.

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That's... Just exactly the problem again, and also seems incredibly prone to negotiation, a thing I think is an unalloyed bad, but opinions clearly vary. I'm proposing instead that after the introduction of an obstacle players be given a knowable amount of mechanical space before their actions can be the trigger for a new complication. It really doesn't translate to the Blades play loop, but it would look something like replacing consequences beyond "nothing happens" with a clock that is ticked up by failure until the GM is permitted to introduce any other consequence.

The disconnect is what @Thomas Shey pointed out earlier; if a player is expecting consequences to follow as a reflection of the quality of their decision making and that's instead handed over to a dice result, no amount of enthusiasm for "finding out" is going to fix the situation.

Pedantic said:

The disconnect is what @Thomas Shey pointed out earlier; if a player is expecting consequences to follow as a reflection of the quality of their decision making and that's instead handed over to a dice result, no amount of enthusiasm for "finding out" is going to fix the situation.

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I don’t understand what this means.

Also, I feel like we’ve gone around on this before and you just have a very unique take on play that I can’t quite grasp. Are you the poster that would almost prefer extremely defined and constrained procedures the players can navigate with a high degree of predictability and openness?

Campbell said:

It's not about the playstyle. It's about the argument because it almost frames exploration as the equivalent of eating your vegetables so you can eat desert. When the reason you play or run a game that involves these low stake scenes should be because you enjoy those scenes. The idea that people who do not enjoy those scenes are missing out in the scenes they enjoy because they are not playing through exploration scenes they do not want to play is silly.

Furthermore, there are going to be highs and lows to any play experience. We do not always bring it equally to every situation. There will be high points and low points regardless. There's no need to actively aim for them.

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There's a framing problem here though; it's not a question of "scenes" at all to the player enjoying the exploration element here. If the goal is a sense of a consistent, fictional setting, then null results or low tension moments provide validation that high tension situations are as "real."

There's work being done there that does pay off later, and that pay off would be diminished without it. The enjoyment of the two paradigms in conversation here is sufficiently different that they can't really be described on each other's terms meaningfully.

hawkeyefan said:

I am all for the players doing whatever they want... but if it's aimless wandering or just in-character fluff with no real stakes or pathos, then I'm only gonna tolerate it so long before I move things along.

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So when players are engaged in what they want to do, even if it's aimless wandering or just in-character fluff with no real stakes or pathos, you step in and "move things along" if it doesn’t meet your standard for dramatic weight?

That sounds less like freedom and creative collaboration and more like conditional permission. Players can do what they want, as long as it creates the kind of stakes you deem valid.

Isn't that just another form of authorial control, dressed up as openness?

zakael19 said:

I don’t understand what this means.

Also, I feel like we’ve gone around on this before and you just have a very unique take on play that I can’t quite grasp. Are you the poster that would almost prefer extremely defined and constrained procedures the players can navigate with a high degree of predictability and openness?

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For sure. I'm saying here that a player who's looking to find the correct sequence of 3 decisions that gets them out scott free isn't going to be bothered if they get it wrong on decision 2 and get caught, but they are going to be very upset if the resolution process doesn't fundamentally allow for any decision to be more correct than any other.

Micah Sweet said:

Whereas I feel the GM should be allowing the players to make whatever decisions they want, interesting or otherwise, that are within the power of their PCs to make.

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I thought the GM should also not feel obligated to facilitate play they don't enjoy? If a couple of the players want to do things that I find unenjoyable (stakeless shopping expedition #137), can't I simply montage that and move on to something everybody enjoys together?

AnotherGuy said:

I actually really enjoy Fail Forwards, Success with Complications and Degrees of Failure/Success.

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I'm fine with degrees of failure/success as long as underneath it all a fail ultimately remains a fail and a success ultimately remains a success.

Often, though, it seems those who promote fail-forward are looking to mitigate the effects of a 'fail' roll such that the player still gets something desireable out of it, and those who promote success with complications are looking for a way of turnng a 'fail' roll into a form of 'success' roll.

It doesn't help that examples I've seen given tend to conflate the two. One I recall getting into an argument about in here a few years ago was about climbing a wall, where an example of 'fail forward' was that on a failed roll you might in fact climb the wall but now be facing unexpected guards on the other side; to me that's textbook 'success with complication' - you reached the top of the wall (success) but something's gone wrong up there (there's guards about to shoot at you).

robertsconley said:

So when players are engaged in what they want to do, even if it's aimless wandering or just in-character fluff with no real stakes or pathos, you step in and "move things along" if it doesn’t meet your standard for dramatic weight?

That sounds less like freedom and creative collaboration and more like conditional permission. Players can do what they want, as long as it creates the kind of stakes you deem valid.

Isn't that just another form of authorial control, dressed up as openness?

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I'm open up front when we start a game that if a scene seems to be going in circles or there's nothing at stake, I'm going to straight up ask "hey, is there anything more we want to do here?" Likewise I'm clear that there's specific Moves (eg: Keep Company in Stonetop, downtime actions in FITD) where I'm stepping back as the GM or facilitating the players in putting together whatever downtempo IC-talking and character developments they want to pursue. The game is designed with that sort of space to have ebbs and flows of GM actions vs player space. Other more snow-bally ones like AW less so.

But I will say that most people playing narrativist games are not doing so for many stakeless scenes, the rules and principles are pretty freaking clear about this. Back to "buying into premise" when you sit down at the table.

zakael19 said:

I thought the GM should also not feel obligated to facilitate play they don't enjoy? If a couple of the players want to do things that I find unenjoyable (stakeless shopping expedition #137), can't I simply montage that and move on to something everybody enjoys together?

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Sure, as long as it’s acknowledged that you’re putting your thumb on the scale so the campaign reflects your creative agenda as well as the players’.

And since you’re the referee, that gives you an effective veto, regardless of what the system claims, because without you, the campaign doesn’t happen.

That’s why it’s a bit hypocritical to criticize traditional play for giving the referee too much authority, when the systems meant to “fix” that still rely on the referee for the very thing you just described.

But this isn’t a “gotcha.” It circles back to a point I’ve made before: systems alone can’t solve this problem. What does is a shared commitment to good leadership and good sportsmanship, players and referees working together to make the campaign a fun and rewarding experience for everyone involved.