D&D General A glimpse at WoTC's current view of Rule 0

[soviet]

So it is obviously meant to be an absurd example. But it is that just because it is not expected in D&D, nor is there mechanic for handling it. But if we were playing a game where the players could introduce beneficial setting elements, coincidences and plot twists by paying plot points, and the player paid 12 plot points they had saved over several sessions for "major deus ex machina," then Little Boy, the ancient fission dragon swooping in to help would be fair and a perfectly legit gameplay.

None of the games I'm familiar with work like this. The purpose of players adding setting elements isn't to provide mechanisms for 'defeating encounters' or the like. That kind of terminology or approach wouldn't even make any sense. The purpose is to enrich and develop the setting and therefore the story that unfolds.

If such a game did feature a big powerful dragon, it would be something like the Odin example, or how a warlock pact ought to play out. Servicing the relationship with the powerful entity would be a big part of play, as would the cost (not financial or metagame points) of bringing it to bear.

But D&D does not have any sort of system for this, and isn't really built around players using setting element introduction for problem solving. So then when we go beyond what is mostly flavour, it gets somewhat tricky. What might be perfectly fine for one person might be bad faith play for another.

But again we have gone here from 'I know a blacksmith' or 'This bar has music' to 'I know an all-powerful third party that will solve all my problems'. No-one is advocating for all-powerful dragon servants.

 

[pemerton]

In my Classic Traveller game, the players, and their PCs, worked out who was behind a bioweapons conspiracy. At the start of the game, this was a mystery to which neither the players, nor the PCs, nor I the GM, knew the answer.

Then they did not actually "work it out" they invented it. That is not solving a mystery.

I'm not sure who you mean by "they".

If you mean the players, then what you say is not accurate. If you mean the game participants then what you say is accurate, but only on a distributed (cf collective) reading of the plural. The GM (me) framed the scenes and narrated the consequences.

This. In order to solve a puzzle, a solution must exist. Making up a solution is not solving it. You can fill in a crossword by writing random words in the boxes, but that is not SOLVING it.

See my reply to @Crimson Longinus just above. I don't think you have a very clear grasp of how the play of my Classic Traveller game - which followed the 1977 rules for resolution, but with a departure from its rules for when and how to draw the star map - was played.

As I said, at the start of the game, there was a mystery to which no one at the table knew the answer. After about 7 sessions, the mystery had been solved.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

None of the games I'm familiar with work like this. The purpose of players adding setting elements isn't to provide mechanisms for 'defeating encounters' or the like. That kind of terminology or approach wouldn't even make any sense. The purpose is to enrich and develop the setting and therefore the story that unfolds.

So leveraging these player generated elements for any sort of advantage is bad faith play, is that what you're saying?

If such a game did feature a big powerful dragon, it would be something like the Odin example, or how a warlock pact ought to play out. Servicing the relationship with the powerful entity would be a big part of play, as would the cost (not financial or metagame points) of bringing it to bear.

But you still feel there needs to be some cost for it to be fair. D&D really has no framework for such though, so it becomes very "mother may I," especially when talking about nigh omnipotent things like gods.

But again we have gone here from 'I know a blacksmith' or 'This bar has music' to 'I know an all-powerful third party that will solve all my problems'. No-one is advocating for all-powerful dragon servants.

Well, I think that dragon has less of a difference to the Odin than Odin has to the blacksmith.

 

[pemerton]

I wonder if your rhetorical opponents are looking at this from the perspective of D&D, where there are specific rules and abilities for different levels of power, or are they assuming a mechanically narrative focus?

I think we've all been talking about doing these things in D&D.

Not only am I talking from a perspective of D&D, but I've posted actual play examples from D&D play!

There is more in D&D than is dreamed of in some people's philosophies!

Maybe technically, but the perspective of @pemerton , @hawkeyefan , and others seems deeply informed by their experiences of and preferences for narrative-focused games (PBtA, Stonetop, Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant, and Blades in the Dark are all current or recent games for these two I believe). Those games not only use very different rules from traditional D&D and its relatives, but very different philosophies of play and different balances of GM/player authority. What seems simple and logical from that perspective may not be so from a different one.

I GMed my first session of 4e D&D in early (Jan or Feb) 2009. At that point in time Apocalypse World had not been published, nor any of the games derived from or influenced by it. I had never read nor played Prince Valiant - as I've posted before, my copy of Prince Valiant is from the Kickstarter that took place some time in the past decade (2016 might have been when it started?). And while I don't recall when I first read Burning Wheel - though I think it was after 2009 - I did not play it until 2014: [Burning Wheel] First Burning Wheel session | Roleplaying Actual Play

The first action declaration I recall in my 4e game, in which a PC called on the power of their god to aid them, was in a fight with an undead (maybe a wight?) in what would have been, from memory, the fourth or fifth session. So some time in the first half of 2009. I resolved it using the rules of the game (including extrapolation from the guidelines on p 42).

It's simply not true that D&D play precludes this sort of thing, or breaks down if it is incorporated.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not only am I talking from a perspective of D&D, but I've posted actual play examples from D&D play!

There is more in D&D than is dreamed of in some people's philosophies!

I GMed my first session of 4e D&D in early (Jan or Feb) 2009. At that point in time Apocalypse World had not been published, nor any of the games derived from or influenced by it. I had never read nor played Prince Valiant - as I've posted before, my copy of Prince Valiant is from the Kickstarter that took place some time in the past decade (2016 might have been when it started?). And while I don't recall when I first read Burning Wheel - though I think it was after 2009 - I did not play it until 2014: [Burning Wheel] First Burning Wheel session | Roleplaying Actual Play

The first action declaration I recall in my 4e game, in which a PC called on the power of their god to aid them, was in a fight with an undead (maybe a wight?) in what would have been, from memory, the fourth or fifth session. So some time in the first half of 2009. I resolved it using the rules of the game (including extrapolation from the guidelines on p 42).

It's simply not true that D&D play precludes this sort of thing, or breaks down if it is incorporated.

As I've said, 4e is the least traditional version of D&D, and many people do not view it as especially representative of D&D in general. Beyond that, do you believe your play was as the designers of 4e intended, or simply allowed by the text and extrapolated on your part?

 

[pemerton]

My posts, and I think the posts of others, have still been about what's possible or enjoyable within D&D. I don't just play storygame style RPGs. I also play and GM traditional games like D&D, MERP, and WFRP 1e.

When I run those games I do approach them differently, and I don't delegate world creation elements to the players in the same way. BUT, I have learned that such delegation can be fun, particularly at a micro level. So if the players go somewhere I haven't prepped, eg a roadside tavern, I might ask them to tell me some things about it - who the landlord is, whether there's a band, whather there's food, other details.

I don't generally do what you describe - ask the players to tell me things about stuff that's not their PCs - in any of the RPGs that I GM.

But from time to time the players make assertions about things that their PCs are experiencing or remembering, and those things get incorporated into the shared fiction.

And sometimes it's a bit more abstract than that, in a sense I'll try and explain via the following example: in the late 80s I was GMing an AD&D game where the two PCs were a duergar fighter/thief and a svirfneblin illusionist/thief. We started in the Keep of B2 fame. I don't even recall whether our play got to the Caves - I suspect not, given my lack of memory. But the players got up to various hijinks in the Keep, and discovered the evil priest and his cult, and this cult plot then was followed by them to Critwall (I had set the Keep in Greyhawk's Shield Lands), where (as I recall) it turned out the mayor's wife was a member of the cult.

The actions that the players declared for their PCs started from a premise that thiefly hijinks were feasible - that is, that not every strongbox was guarded by an impossible lock and a glyph of warding; that not every door was guarded 24/7; etc. Those are not concrete details of setting elements, but rather an orientation towards, or assumption about, the setting that is implicit in, and very important to, the players' declarations of actions for their PCs. And as the GM, I followed their lead.

AD&D is not the robust ruleset for this sort of thing, because there are times when it would be nice to have rules for making checks, and establishing consequences, that AD&D doesn't have. So these days I would never go back to it, given that I have Burning Wheel and Torchbearer and other games whose rules are more robust.

But nothing about AD&D makes the sort of gaming we did with it impossible - I mean, if it was impossible we wouldn't have been able to do it! In fact it's pretty straightforward. Me and my friend were hardly supra-geniuses of RPGing!

 

[Oofta]

Great post.

This is exactly what I was looking for.

You're correct with both your inventorying of (part of) the situation at the top and your appraisal at the bottom.

Net, I definitely think its counterproductive to clarity in conversations around TTRPGing to bin all kinds of (sometimes rather disparate or disconnected) priorities under a priority for immersion.

* We sometimes see challenge-based priorities unhelpfully binned under immersion.

* We sometimes see priorities around a very particular and very novel form of power fantasy where inner workings are perpetually authored (one that doesn't cohere with our own human experiences of our inner workings nor the inner workings of protagonists within the vast repository of fiction and mythology that our games draw upon as touchstones...whether mortals or gods, inner workings are not exclusively authored...they're sometimes bewildering and sometimes alien as we succumb to them rather than dictate them) unhelpfully binned under a priority for immersion.

* We sometimes see priorities around how authority is distributed and "ownership rights" (my character's inner workings are my exclusive purview) unhelpfully binned under a priority for immersion.

* We definitely see a tendency to unhelpfully talk about immersion as being one thing to the collective (rather than idiosyncratic and autobiographical) and certain things being anathema to that one thing/collective (like the infamous Dissociated Mechanics essay of yore).

* And, to circle back, we sometimes see realistic and immersive unhelpfully used interchangeably.

Sometimes there is some varying degree of overlap on a Venn Diagram for these things. But certainly not always, certainly not in every situation/game, certainly not for every participant, and just running them all together into an entangled mass makes it (a) extremely difficult to communicate clearly about this stuff, (b) makes it difficult to design and select games for specific priorities (especially when those priorities conflict with other priorities), and (c) makes it difficult when trying to execute the running or the playing of a game that prioritizes one thing vs a game that prioritizes a different thing.

I'm not sure exactly what the confusion (if any) is. When I play D&D, I want to inhabit a character. See the world through their eyes interact with the game world through what the character says and does. As a player I only want to interact with the world via my character. Obviously I get information about the world as a player, but even then I try to decide how my character would see the world. If I have a BDF (big dumb fighter) and the DM describes a scene, the way my character perceives the scene may well not be my best understanding of the scene. For me emotions are a bit of a fuzzy area, a DM saying I'm surprised or something unexpected happens is okay but telling me I'm feeling some other emotion? Well, there are some situations where other people would be frightened but I would not be. Heights don't really bother me, my wife can't go near the edge of a drop-off. So some characters will be frightened by specific situations, others will not. I want it to be up to me what my emotional response will be.

As a player I don't want to describe what the tavern looks like. As an individual, I can't just imagine a tavern and it appears. So if I talk about something being more realistic it's in the sense that I realistically can only alter the world around me through my actions.

 

[Lanefan]

They didn't change it. It goes boom, so the Arrowhead of Complete Destruction is still an option.
View attachment 386756

Given that in my game a Bag of Holding costs 10,000 g.p. and a Portable Hole costs 30,000 g.p., I'd say that if someone wants to blow 40K g.p.* to generate a 20' diameter kaboom then more power to 'em.

* - plus whatever costs arise in shrinking the two items to the approiriate size and in the construction of the special arrowhead...

 

[pemerton]

I think a lot of this is on point. I have been speaking almost exclusively about D&D in this thread, except for a few comments on other games and examples of play from Pathfinder and Stonetop. But the style of play I’m advocating for… the recommendation that DMs do what they can to work with player ideas… has been about D&D.

Have my views been influenced by other games? Absolutely. I don’t see how that’s a problem in any way.

As I posted not far upthread, I think my trajectory has been the opposite.

There has been stuff I've been doing, or wanted to do, in my RPGing. And this has led me to various RPGs: to Rolemaster, then to 4e D&D, then to other RPGs. Including back to Classic Traveller - a radical little game published in 1977!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

But from time to time the players make assertions about things that their PCs are experiencing or remembering, and those things get incorporated into the shared fiction.

What sort of guidelines, principles etc there are in place for this?

The actions that the players declared for their PCs started from a premise that thiefly hijinks were feasible - that is, that not every strongbox was guarded by an impossible lock and a glyph of warding; that not every door was guarded 24/7; etc. Those are not concrete details of setting elements, but rather an orientation towards, or assumption about, the setting that is implicit in, and very important to, the players' declarations of actions for their PCs. And as the GM, I followed their lead.

This seems rather reasonable assumption completely irrespective of the player intent to me, but OK.

AD&D is not the robust ruleset for this sort of thing, because there are times when it would be nice to have rules for making checks, and establishing consequences, that AD&D doesn't have. So these days I would never go back to it, given that I have Burning Wheel and Torchbearer and other games whose rules are more robust.

But nothing about AD&D makes the sort of gaming we did with it impossible - I mean, if it was impossible we wouldn't have been able to do it! In fact it's pretty straightforward. Me and my friend were hardly supra-geniuses of RPGing!

So I don't think anyone has said it is impossible. But like you yourself observe, it is ill suited for it. So it makes sense to me that people prefer not to play it that way. If they preferred another style, there now are a plethora of games that are a better fit for it. Choose game that suits the style you want is pretty obvious and solid advice.