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

Hussar said:

Except that you're the DM. Contriving any sort of connection as to why the NPC knows something is ludicrously easy. And, you can simply rely back on the old saw of "it's a logical consequence" and be magically right every time.

It's simple. The DM is the one eyed man in the land of the blind. Even further than that, every single thing in the game world can only be viewed through the lens that the DM presents. How the DM describes something will always affect the reactions of the players. It's completely unavoidable. So, the NPC knows that the party has been captured? How? Well, let me roll out my magic typewriter and cobble together a couple of paragraphs explaining how that happened. It's all post hoc and complete hogwash, but, it's all part of a "living world".

Click to expand...

pemerton said:

I've not played Deathmatch Island. But I think that Agon would be quite challenging for someone whose only or principal experience is mainstream D&D and some structurally fairly similar games like CoC and ShadowDark. The rules in Agon are complete; but the expectations on players ("Hero players") and GM ("Strife player") are sufficiently different from D&D that I think it would be easy to get tripped up.

I can't comment on Stonetop vs Dungeon World, but I think DW is probably less of a radical departure from D&D than Agon.

Click to expand...

Maxperson said:

Okay. That's not how we do it. Any area, including a city, has the potential for CR 20+ stuff. The farther out you go, the more likely you are to encounter powerful things. Look at the wandering monster tables in 1e-3e. Any party could easily run into something waaaaaaay out of their range in any environment.

We don't make our worlds like WoW where there's a starting area and then you go to the next area when you outgrow the starting area and encounter stuff your level. There is no 1-4 area here, and then a 3-5 canyon over there. Thinking that way is a good way to end up with a TPK.

Click to expand...

Gimby said:

Before the first expansion, the human city in WoW - Stormwind - reachable at level 1, contained a black dragon and their minions that could potentially appear and kill any low level character in the castle at the time. Higher level elites than most mobs prowled the Silverpine woods in the Sons of Aragul. Multiple zones had sub-zones containing higher level or elite enemies. Giants in Aszhara or the entrance to Uldam in Tanaris. What you describe is literally how WoW was designed at launch.

-edit and this should really come as a surprise to no-one, as WoW like Everquest before it derived a lot of it's design principles from fairly old-school D&D.

Click to expand...

Hussar said:

Heh. I did play Everquest for a very short while many, many years ago. But, I do recall dying a HELL of a lot, even in the "easy" areas.

Click to expand...

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.

Click to expand...

SableWyvern said:

On a slightly different point, this comment helped me identify more clearly the problem I have with fail forward in a more grounded game.

Using a typical fail forward type of resolution system, if the PCs are picking a lock, the expected outcomes are likely to be:

• 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).

In my mind, I can't help but see that the game world is responding to character decisions with interesting outcomes, which makes it feel like a world that exists to do things the players find interesting. But that's not how the real world works. Making a decision to act doesn't mean something interesting happens. Sometimes, the door just stays locked.

I'm sure it's possible to disassociate those things -- just because the player decision led to a roll that led to something interesting happening doesn't mean that the interesting event is actually tied to the character decision. But it certainly feels that way to me, and that's typically not the feeling I want.

Interestingly, I'm completely OK with the Unusual Event results in Rolemaster, which are basically failure with an interesting complication (and predate AW by 15-odd years) but this is largely because they are rare (literally 1-in-100) outliers, which makes it much easier for me to rationalise them as "unexpected coincidence" rather than business as usual.

Click to expand...

zakael19 said:

Eh, to be fair the OP was more about all the people whinging about the new art and tone and such - “you can stick with what you like without putting the new stuff down because it doesn’t feel like what you’re accustomed to” seems valid when I think it’d safe to say WOTC knew the wide audience they were appealing too. Considering that all the folks I know younger than me who I showed the books to absolutely loved the art and style changes, I think the point there was pretty laser focused.

I’m not entirely sure when or why the thread segued into whatever it’s been for about 800 pages now.

Click to expand...

hawkeyefan said:

So I just wanted to snip this bit out because I think it’s very relevant. First, I want to say that I understand your reasoning on this, and even if I didn’t, it’s a preference and like any preference, you’re entitled to have it.

But there aren’t any RPGs that work the way the real world works. Even when a GM is doing nothing but considering all the factors and weighing all the different aspects of a situation to make a decision… that’s not the way the real world works. What we’re talking about is still a participant in a game making a decision about what happens in play.

I get that it may feel closer to how the real world works to you or any given player. But that doesn’t change the fact that all RPGs consist of people making stuff up. None of them work the way the real world works.

There is no GM in the real world.

This maybe seems like a silly nitpick, but I think it’s a pretty significant part of the outlooks that are at play which causes conflict when discussing.



Well, I for one like to talk about how a given game might be well-suited for a particular task… and how it is well-suited.

Honestly, I also think that sometimes the “sides” get so starkly drawn that people start assuming comparisons are being made even when that may not be the case.

Click to expand...

Hussar said:

Not quite. D&D worlds and sandboxes will be designed in such a way that the challenges in a given area will be geared for a certain level range. So this forest is for levels 1-4. That canyon is for levels 3-5. That mountain is for levels 14+. So on and so forth. In play, the DM will pretty clearly signpost this and make sure that the players don't unknowingly wander into areas they shouldn't.

Granted, the DM won't stop you. Fair enough. But, the DM will make it very clear that if you wander into that mountain area, your characters will die. By the same token, your 15th level characters will never have a reason to go to that forest again. Once you've moved beyond the level range of a given area, that area will be done for the duration of the campaign, unless, of course, we start into the whole "living world" idea and then that forest will have a dangerous monster suddenly move in, because, now the party is 15th level.

Every single aspect of the sandbox is in service to the level system. It's unavoidable. I just don't understand why everyone seems to want to bury the lede here and pretend that it's something it's not.

Yes, as a DM, since you create every single facet of the world, you are writing stories. It's unavoidable. You cannot run a game and not create stories. It's simply not possible in a system where 99% of the content of the world comes from one single source and the other 1% is still presented through the lens of that single source as well.

Yes, your sandbox world is in service to the level system. It's unavoidable. That's one of the biggest reasons WHY we got non-leveled systems created - so that we could world build without having to deal with a level system where the capabilities of the characters have such an ENORMOUS range. GURPS got mentioned. The difference between a 50 point and a 150 point GURPS character is about 3 levels of a D&D character. Maybe 5. And most campaigns in GURPS won't see a 100 point growth. That's a VERY long campaign. To go from a 1st to 15th level D&D character in GURPS isn't feasible. It just can't happen. GURPS characters don't work like that. The idea that your GURPS character could fall off a mountain into a lake of lava and be perfectly fine the next day is just not how GURPS works.

Again, it just baffles me how much obfuscation that people want to pretend is going on here. It's just mind boggling.

Click to expand...