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

"The nearest dude" is most likely another PC, assuming they enter as a group. Is that actually what you intended, or were you insufficiently specific?
I was not going to post this, but I thought this when I first read this post: back in the day I had a DM that would have 100% taken it literally like that and made the PC roll to hit another character (whoever was sitting closest at the gaming table probably) without allowing any clarification or take-backs.
 

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@Oofta can you see any scenario where a player via character asks your character an origin question which details likely have not been already established and you are not required to turn to the DM for authorship powers?

i.e. Did you have siblings? How many siblings did you have? What does your name mean in elvish? Was your mother a good cook? Were you close to your father? Did you parents ever dabble in magic? Was your family religious/traditional? ...etc
This is what I was getting at earlier, yes.
 

I was not going to post this, but I thought this when I first read this post: back in the day I had a DM that would have 100% taken it literally like that and made the PC roll to hit another character (whoever was sitting closest at the gaming table probably) without allowing any clarification or take-backs.
And that's exactly the sort of "Oh, you weren't careful enough in your questions; you weren't specific enough in what you told me you were doing" terrible DMing I'm advocating against.
 

I was not going to post this, but I thought this when I first read this post: back in the day I had a DM that would have 100% taken it literally like that and made the PC roll to hit another character (whoever was sitting closest at the gaming table probably) without allowing any clarification or take-backs.
I would certainly ask for clarification, especially since I’ve probably prepared at least some of the NPCs in the inn before the game, I would describe several candidates and ask who they wanted to target.
 

As I-as-player come to realize I can get away with a little bit more each time, so too would my character in the fiction very likely come to the same realization.

So if in-character I one day ask Odin for a very minor boon and get it, then later ask Him for a slightly more significant boon and get it, etc., it won't be long before my character has Odin on speed-dial. :)
Maybe. I-as-a-player know lots of things my character doesn't. I know I can bribe the DM with hot wings to get a magic item, but my character certainly doesn't know that. :)

Being in the presence of Odin could have struck him with such awe that he's terrified to invoke his power again. Or he's feels such gratitude that he doesn't want to show the temerity of asking for another boon.

Metagame, I know I pushed the DM a little bit with the request for divine intervention; I'm not going to push my luck by escalating. I'm going to narrate my character changing in such a way that further requests of that magnitude wouldn't make sense.
 

Think of it this way, I place on my VR goggles and interact (IMMERSE) with the VR world. If every so often, I have to take off my VR goggles and write code for the VR world, I'm breaking my immersion with the VR world.

Can you now explain to me why you see this (authority is distributed and "ownership rights") as unhelpful?

For reference, I'm going to go ahead and copy/paste/quote my text that you're working off of because we're pointing at different things. I'll clarify what I'm pointing at in a moment, but first let me just discuss what you're talking about above.

So your analogy here is surely referring to the lament that we have heard expressed aplenty in this thread and on these boards. It goes something like if a procedure requires me to engage with rules or meta-conversation around collaboration or content generation, and I feel the process or its results are beyond the scope of my in-fiction character, it breaks my immersion.

We've litigated this one to death in excruciatingly detail over the course of forever, so I'm not really inclined to rehash all of the various aspects of this. However, this different than what I'm pointing at with the quoted text below:

* 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.

So the following cases are TTRPG participant priorities around authority and ownership rights that get mistakenly cast under this absurdly large net of immersion priorities:

* A player is in a relatively low agency game where their consequential decisions around (a) what is salient in play is subordinated to the GM/module outright or by proxy of the social compact of "group play." The net effect of the pressure to "incorporate interests" means that (b) individual player contribution via play-shaping character motivations are muted wholly or nearly so while the GM's individual contribution becomes proportionally magnified via their prepped content having exclusive rights over saliency + setting ownership + their titanic role in action resolution mediation.

Such a player might balk when the small amount of ownership and authority they get to express in play, such as that of (i) the inner workings of their PC or (ii) color/performance around their PC's attire/kit/affect or (iii) whether they get to authentically engage with the combat mechanics to slay the orc in front of them, is abridged by either GM or resolution process.

This particular situation is an expression of concerns over ownership rights and authority distribution. It is not about immersion.

* A player is interested in both challenge-based priorities and the interests of expeditiousness in table handling time. As such, they want each of their fellow players to take discrete ownership and exacting care over their character's various loadouts/handles (ammunition, rations, torches, spells, uses of x/y/z, etc). It isn't that community care over these things or developed consensus via meta-conversations bother them from an immersion perspective. The problem for this player is any number of (i) it bogs down play or (ii) "Jimmy isn't pulling their weight and putting increased stress on others as a result" or (iii) the GM is showing signs of being apt to deploy Force and fudge results/manipulate numbers in order "to make up for Jimmy's lapses," thereby taking away our rights to authentically move the gamestate.




Hopefully that does the work I intended. There are plenty of cases where concerns over ownership rights and authority distribution have nothing to do with priorities for immersion, but they so often get binned there (as so many things do...into this giant pile of "but muh immersion" that becomes impossible to disentangle from other interests). Some of it is because some players either aren't in touch with their actual concerns. Some of it is because they are in touch with their actual concerns but they don't know how to effectively articulate them. Still others are because either a personal tendency to be conflict-averse or because of the social pressure to "go along to get along."
 




My players make things difficult for themselves quite often!
I make things difficult for myself all the time. As a player. In D&D. 5e, specifically.
I don't know how you do it. In the case of the players in my game, it's generally by adhering to the fiction in some fashion: the fiction of the character, or the situation, or some NPC.

They don't just treat the fiction as "set-dressing", or a means to an end.
 

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