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

    The “but it’s what my character would do!” defense is offered up almost universally as a “stop judging / being angry at me folks” for behavior that makes the experience crappy or goes against what the rest of the party had decided / wants to do in an obnoxious way. If you’re simply acting...
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    Oooohhh thats a good one. For the sake of setting stakes, how do we calculate the "average adventurer's competence" :P.
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    People are bad at risk assessment in terms of like, "future planning" and stuff. We also love doing risky stuff. We also tend to recognize immediate risks in an area of professional competence. Do I expect an adventurer to assess the long term risks of investments? Maybe not. Do I expect them...
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    I'm sorry that you seem to stagger through life with no awareness of the risks inherent in what you do, or any judgement of potentially dangerous actions you take.
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    Oh, all the time. You think some description is so clear but somebody missed a word or you got a little too long winded or your phrasing made them go "wait, no, that's gotta be X!" and next thing you know they're declaring actions that are like impossible / clearly in your head dangerous when...
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    What we narrate in the open is stuff that is important to play that an actual person in the context would likely notice. This is made more manifest via mechanics that open a clear metachannel in some of these games, such as the "Read A..." moves from AW. This isn't "the bartender has a...
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    D&D General Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford Join Darrington Press

    Does much of the player base even know who Perkins and Crawford are?
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    D&D General Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford Join Darrington Press

    Well then. Not what I would’ve expected at all.
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    I love how Stonetop’s end of session bakes in this emphasis on relationships, it’s so fun to pause and reflect - and it means you should be always trying to form new or change your existing ones and really capture that. Hx and Strings do a great job of representing the same mechanically as...
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    Stonetop is pretty straightforwardly designed to be setting/exploration based narrativist play, which makes sense based on its 4e->DW roots with the idea of the Town itself being a major focus of play inspired from the dropped “Storming the Wizard’s Tower” game from the Bakers.
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    I mean, the fiction changed on each failure (the mirror attacks), they use the mechanics to reset and make choices, and you had a robust metachannel open. Sounds pretty solid and fail-forward to me :P. (this is partially a joke)
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    Most of the time when we attempt something IRL that carries risk, we know what the risks are at least to a general level. If you go driving and crash, you knew that crashing was on the table (I hope). If you're climbing a climbing wall beyond your skill, you know you might stall out and have to...
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    sounds like a lesser success/reduced effect to me. In fact a core example in blades (or scum and villainy or both?) is not being able to make it all the way across a guarded courtyard in a single sneaky prowl. A think I like about FITD games is you can make that an outcome, and then ask the...
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    It's far more implied in AW (eg: talking about asking questions and building on them, that's not 1st person answers a lot of the time, the moves that are full of meta-channel stuff like the "Read A...", talking about turning questions back onto the group at large, etc); but most newer games are...
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    PBTAs, FITD, Daggerheart, etc all advise the creation and maintenance of a "metachannel" at all times during play - rising and falling in and out of character to discuss procedures, check in on each other, validate the fiction, talk through framing, before falling back down into character view...
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    "Optimizing the fiction" to shape the outcome range is definitely part of what I see as fiction-first gameplay, for the games that bring that sort of thing in. Blades codifies this well in the Position conversation. But I dont think you ever intentionally and consistently hit the sort of "ok...
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    I'm simply not old enough to know about any of the early days of the hobby, but I definitely see this coming up the most as a complaint with regards to modules these days. Eg: grumpy posts on r/DMA about "my player read the module and is now complaining that Im not running it as written / knows...
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    I kinda misunderstood your previous post - I was agreeing with the idea that players not expecting / knowing of objective DCs for a hard skill system isn’t that inconceivable.
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    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    I mean a) you're encouraged to figure out ways to get Advantage bestowed by the GM on stuff, b) the DCs in pretty much every published adventure bear no relationship to the iterate-by-5s stuff in the DMG, and c) almost no DMs are open about the DCs of things. How would a player have any idea...
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