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

Lanefan said:

If the rules or the players' action declarations or the dice or the situation dictate that these characters will die then I-as-DM feel I'm under no obligation to artificially keep them alive.

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What rule dictates that a secret admirer won't attempt to free an imprisoned PC?

(I also note that dice rolls only have meaning in the context of rules that tell us when to make them and what to make of them.)

EzekielRaiden said:

Okay. Then the repeated and frequent insistence on several things in this thread has been...what? Complete non-sequiturs?

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I don't know. I suggest you find the comments you're confused about and ask the people who made them.

EzekielRaiden said:

You are quite literally arguing against something nobody here has said, nobody here would say. Where is this argument arising from? Who said these things? If you're going to take me to task for not being able to precisely quote anyone on the ten-word phrase above, why should I not do the same to you with this argument that you literally made up without any reference to any post in this thread?

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Cool.You and I are clearly in agreement on this, then. If no one else disagrees with me, that's great too. Maybe I misunderstood a comment at some point.

EzekielRaiden said:

I mean it seems to me that that is precisely what is required from Lanefan's "you never know, down the road..." standard. You never know what might happen from every single event, no matter how small. Does that not mean you need to play through them all, unless-and-until the players explicitly state otherwise?

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No, it's not required for the entire game to run in 1:1 time. In general, I assume most groups run the scenes people want to play through. The point of disagreement is just about which scenes those might be.

Lanefan said:

I think it might hinge on the level of in-fiction contrivance required to keep making things happen where logic says nothing should.

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Okay.

I don't see why "Okay guys, I messed up, you shouldn't have been put in a situation like this, let's rewind and do things differently" isn't an example where logic says nothing should happen. That's precisely what in-world logic says should happen: nothing. Nobody's coming to save you. The evil wizard's beautiful daughter doesn't show up in the nick of time to save you. A braggart BBEG doesn't come down to gloat and give you a convenient moment to escape. An earthquake doesn't come along and rip the dungeon open but causing no permanent injuries in the party. Etc.

Like that specific thing--"I'm sorry guys, I screwed up, let's fix this situation with <backtracking/retconning/rewriting/time-skipping/etc.>"--is, in and of itself, completely outside what logic in the fictional space says could happen.

Micah Sweet said:

When the players do stuff with their PCs, no matter how unimportant it might seem to the GM, the fiction is not "entirely unchanged".

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How?

I am being 100% sincere here.

If you go through all the complex motions of the player insisting they want six torches instead of five, whether or not they get those torches, how has that actually changed anything about them?

As I already said, "high-stakes" things are high-stakes to the character, which may or may not have any relationship to ~world-shaking events~ or whatever. Those things absolutely, 100% matter.

But doing a shopping trip, the thing everyone keeps harping on as so vitally important that we MUST play through it to the hilt every single time unless the players specifically reject doing so? How is that not leaving the characters "entirely unchanged"? They haven't learned anything (except, perhaps, whether a certain merchant is pliable or not), they haven't grown, they haven't developed, they haven't had their beliefs challenged or reinforced or brought to light, they haven't discovered something new about themselves, they haven't found new love or lost something they cared about or raged at the heavens.

They've tried to get six torches for a silver piece instead of five. That's it. That's literally it. And yet the player is expected to do that at the general goods store, and do it again at the blacksmith, and again at the tailor, and again at the stables, ad nauseam until every single purchase they've felt like making is concluded.

EzekielRaiden said:

Okay. Then the repeated and frequent insistence on several things in this thread has been...what? Complete non-sequiturs?

Because sure, that precise string of ten words might not have been said. But it's pretty clear from things said by @Micah Sweet, @Lanefan, and numerous other posters that the GM exerting any control over those events for any reason was utterly unacceptable.

But perhaps I am wrong? Perhaps GMs forbidding some events and permitting others is actually acceptable? I'd love to hear their thoughts on this. It would...make almost the entirety of this conversation completely baffling to me, but if I'm wrong, I'm wrong.

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Uh...er...before I jump in on this one you'll have to redefine what this is about, I'm afraid, as I've lost the topic somewhere.

EzekielRaiden said:

Now you're just making up nonsense. Fail forward is not GM fiat, plain and simple.

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Well, yes it is; if the die roll says 'fail' and the DM decides it'll be something else instead then it's fiat all day long.

EzekielRaiden said:

As Lanefan has (repeatedly) done, you intentionally pervert the concept of fail forward into "always succeed". It literally has FAIL in the name! It's about failure! You do, in fact, FAIL with fail forward!

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It has fail in the name but not always in the outcome.

If you're trying to climb a wall where success means you reach the top and failure means you don't then by both RAW and RAI a fail roll has to mean, regardless of anything else, that you don't reach the top.

Fail-forward advocates would have it that on failure you might indeed reach the top...which immediately turns what should be a failure, based on the roll, into a success. And that ain't right.

EzekielRaiden said:

How much more do I need to do to reveal this straw man for what it is?

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Sorry, but in this case the man of straw is merely an illusion. Roll to disbelieve.

EzekielRaiden said:

Isn't that exactly what this argues? You never know what MIGHT happen...so you have to roleplay through everything. I challenged this post for precisely that reason.

I mean it seems to me that that is precisely what is required from Lanefan's "you never know, down the road..." standard. You never know what might happen from every single event, no matter how small. Does that not mean you need to play through them all, unless-and-until the players explicitly state otherwise?

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Ideally, yes it does. Practicality, unfortunately, then rears its ugly head and says we can only play through bits of it.

pemerton said:

I don't know about appeal. But as per some of my recent replies, your accounts of how Apocalypse World and some similar games work are riddled with basic technical errors.

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Like the (at this point numerous) examples of people mischaracterizing "fail forward" as somehow meaning "always succeed". Even though I know I've contradicted that several times, and I'm pretty sure you and others have as well.

EzekielRaiden said:

And you are playing in a non-euro-western campaign then, completely outside of the typical D&D fantasy universe?

Because I'm 99.9% sure you use an extremely euro-western campaign setting. I believe we have specifically talked about that in the past, in fact.

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In my game world they've met a variety of faux-ancient/medieval human cultures plus a bunch that aren't human.

And even in some real-world western cultures haggling was far more common in the past than it is today.

EzekielRaiden said:

Only if they care about haggling....which means you've already presumed that every merchant haggles. That's begging the question.

Perhaps; perhaps not. If there's only one in town, why would they even bother haggling? You don't have another choice. You have no leverage other than to make no purchase at all. If they're already set up, they're clearly not starving for business.

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You don't know that until-unless you try haggling the price.

EzekielRaiden said:

So then, if the vast majority of the time even the players don't see the point...would it not be better to default to "no" unless the players express interest, which...is literally what I said from the beginning? Like if you already know that the answer is almost always "no", what is the point of presuming yes and getting the "no" you know you'll get?

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If for the sake of convenience the players just take what's on offer without question, fine with me. But if they decide to question the price, then we're suddenly into a lot more detailed of an encounter than we were before.

SableWyvern said:

You have a really bad habit of getting upset with people who don't want to argue with you, and trying to cast them as bad people for it. It's really quite off-putting.

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Mod Note:

On ENWorld, we prefer that people keep things civil. Part of that is not making things personal. The section quoted fails that metric. Please do better going forward.

EzekielRaiden said:

I don't see why "Okay guys, I messed up, you shouldn't have been put in a situation like this, let's rewind and do things differently" isn't an example where logic says nothing should happen

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You can't see why anyone would value honesty and owning up to mistakes, then fixing them as a group, over trying to hide them for the sake of pretending the world is real?

You've tried to cast traditional GM powers as a path to abuse and claiming infallibility, but we've been telling you for ages that's not how it works.

pemerton said:

What rule dictates that a secret admirer won't attempt to free an imprisoned PC?

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None.

But if said secret admirer has no in-fiction way of knowing the PC is imprisoned then it becomes a rather moot point.