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

Maxperson said:

It worked for D&D just fine. It can be nerve wracking for the players if they are in an area where things are sometimes or often more powerful than they are, but it was their choice to go there.

You keep saying "line up with the level system" as if that's something that happens in this kind of sandbox. It doesn't. You can walk yourself into an area at 3rd level and wander into a beholder. Zap, zap, zap, TPK.

In the kind of sandbox I am referring to, the players have to be cautious when wandering away from town. It gets very dangerous out there. The world does not line up to the D&D level system.

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zakael19 said:

I think that if even the 5e.24 DMG is telling DM's to consider this, it's about as mainstream advice as you can possibly get. To posit otherwise is to grab the thread's statement and hug it close.

Again, the entire OSR play style/culture largely exists to be conservative in a rebellion against whatever they saw as new styles of D&D that didn't fit their desires based on nostalgia/memory/continued play. It's not like this is a new thing, and each edition of the game seems to drag it back out (5e was a conservative edition itself but seems to have wriggled free of that somewhat at least on the surface now).

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Thomas Shey said:

That one is pretty extreme, but there are a lot of lesser ones: a group without a lot of outdoor skills loses the trail their map shows (there are numerous ways this can happen, but a pretty common real world one is people leaving a trail to seek shelter from unexpected weather) and can't find it again (again, not an unknown event). At that point, while they theoretically still have options, they aren't set up for most of them to likely work.

It doesn't have to be a case where there's literally no more options, but just where the other options are low enough chance of success to be unlikely. It isn't technically a dead end, but neither will it likely get you anywhere.



That's kind of the point in avoiding single points of failure. All fail-forward is is a method of doing that systematically.

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pemerton said:

I don't know what this is supposed to mean. What RPG(s) do you have in mind?

Don't all games have rules that manage the back-and-forth of "moves?

Like in D&D, if the player says "I listen at the door", the GM either tells them what their PC hears (if anything), or perhaps calls for a roll and then tells them what their PC hears.

Or if the player says "I walk down the corridor and turn the corner", then the GM responds by saying what the PC sees around the corner; or if the GM's notes indicate that there is some as-yet-unrevealed obstacle, like a concealed pit or a tripwire or whatever, the GM draws on those notes to tell the player what happens to their PC.

If there's something more specific that you've got in mind, are you able to say what that is?

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AlViking said:

Plenty of people have talked about "the players do a [hard or soft] move so as GM I respond with a [hard or soft based on what the players did] move".

That's different from how I run my game. If a character fails to open a lock, nothing happens because they failed to open the lock, although there may be consequences because of something else happening. Frequently it just means they can't open the door and they need to try something else.

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AlViking said:

That's different from how I run my game. If a character fails to open a lock, nothing happens because they failed to open the lock, although there may be consequences because of something else happening. Frequently it just means they can't open the door and they need to try something else.

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• We get through the door and get closer to our objective. (Success)
• We get through the door and get closer to our objective but also discover some interesting complication. (Success with complication)
• We don't get through the door, but something else interesting occurs; or we do get through the door, but something interesting and very bad happens. (Fail forward).

Campbell said:

Players don't make hard or soft moves. They just declare actions which invoke basic moves or playbook moves which are just mechanics that trigger on some fictional event. GM Moves are just GM responses to player actions (Monsterhearts actually calls them Reactions). Soft moves are responses that telegraph things that might happen if players do not make an effort to stop them. Hard moves are irrevocable changes to the setting that change the characters' status quo.

Look, I do not dispute that Apocalypse World and an innumerable number of games that change the GM role in some way, are asking you to do things you personally do not want to do as a GM and restricting the things you like to do. But that does not make them restrictive or mechanically bound. Just not a good fit for your playstyle.

What you are not acknowledging is that most roleplaying games from OD&D and onward have asked people who want to frame scenes and make moves to instead build worlds, describe environments and evaluate actions. You are not acknowledging that for some styles of play 5e is just as restrictive as you find Monsterhearts.

Basically, you are making a general statement that only applies if we see the restrictions and structure of conventional play as the norm. You are doing so in the way that implies things about the experiences other people have, denying our creativity, denying the rich tapestry of our play and how free we feel playing it.

I would never say that because it's a poor vessel for Narrativist play that 5e is restrictive. Because it's not meant to enable and support that play. Can I fight against it in the same way some people fight against the playstyles Dungeon World and Masks were designed to support? Sure, but it's not likely to be a positive experience.

Like, I do not understand why we cannot just respect other games for what they offer, even if they are not for us.

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Micah Sweet said:

if we all respect that all ways we enjoy to play are equal, what do we talk about?

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AlViking said:

Plenty of people have talked about "the players do a [hard or soft] move so as GM I respond with a [hard or soft based on what the players did] move".

That's different from how I run my game. If a character fails to open a lock, nothing happens because they failed to open the lock, although there may be consequences because of something else happening. Frequently it just means they can't open the door and they need to try something else.

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Micah Sweet said:

I am willing to accept that I am a gaming conservative (though I still don't like the nasty implications of the term). I object to it being exhausting, however, as I don't see why people can't be allowed to like what they like; game and let game, to turn a phrase. The whole premise of the OP struck me as a way to call out those who don't share their preferences.

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