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

Micah Sweet said:

You're the one who complained about a lack of desire for change.

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Micah Sweet said:

Because the way I see it, if the game can't go forward with getting through this obstacle, then there must be a story everyone is following that insists upon going through it. Otherwise, the party could simply do something else.

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AlViking said:

Complain? I'm not so sure. More like making a joke at the expense of people that don't change for the sake of change.

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Micah Sweet said:

Because the way I see it, if the game can't go forward with getting through this obstacle, then there must be a story everyone is following that insists upon going through it. Otherwise, the party could simply do something else.

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Faolyn said:

Like I said, never in my experience.



Hmm.

No, I just don't see it. The characters may not be having fun, but the players should be.

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AlViking said:

Complain? I'm not so sure. More like making a joke at the expense of people that don't change for the sake of change.

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EzekielRaiden said:

Okay. You say this as though those things are, like...controversial.

But the plain reading of their opposite is the action grinding to a halt and making no "progress". (Note that this doesn't mean "progress" in the sense of getting closer to a defined end in PbtA any more than it would mean such in a "traditional GM" sandbox. There is no defined end either way. But there is keeping moving vs not doing that.)

I'm certain you would want more positive terms for such, but I don't know what they would be. How would you describe these (as others have said) conflict-neutral, low- or no-stakes events, in a way that is positive rather than seeming to be negative?

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EzekielRaiden said:

I find this both very surprising and very frustrating, because I know I have said to both of you, multiple times, that the books explicitly day the opposite of what you have said here.

That is, they repeatedly reiterate that it is the fiction that matters most. They repeatedly say things like "Start and end with the fiction" and things like the pair of "you have to do it to do it" (read: you do not and should not ever "do a move", you take actions in the fiction, and those actions must first meet some trigger in order for any move to apply) and "if you do it you do it" (read: when a trigger does happen, the move in question occurs, we take care of its rules which resolve an open question of some kind, and then we go right back to the fiction and stay there until another open question occurs). Or how the rules indicate that the GM should only address the players by their character names in order to keep things in character as much as possible.

Like this is...I'm really really struggling here. This is explicit stuff. It's not subtext. It's not hidden. It's not something that only arises out of careful interpretation. It's literally right there on the surface.

So I'm really, really confused why you would get this impression when the text is so overtly clear that this is NOT how it works or what it does. I know both of you are smart, capable people. I know you don't have issues comprehending what a text directly says. So I'm really baffled how you could get this.

It would be like saying that Gygaxian D&D prioritizes narrative over exploration. That's the level of "wait...what? How did you get THAT out of this???" reaction I'm having here.

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hawkeyefan said:

I wasn't complaining! I was making a joke.

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Thomas Shey said:

I'll note this makes the assumption there's something else interesting to do. That's not only not-storytelling, its very sandboxy in its assumptions. It's not hard for there to be a finite number of things that justify an adventuring party in a given area and time frame.

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