A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

[pemerton]

I've commented before that a curious feature of D&D is the use of magic items to circumvent its own "process simulation" conventions.

When it comes to this issue of equipment list mechanics, what is the Bag of Holding but a gameplay device intended to produce much the same experience as BitD, but with an in-fiction process gloss cast over it?

 

[Ovinomancer]

I've commented before that a curious feature of D&D is the use of magic items to circumvent its own "process simulation" conventions.

When it comes to this issue of equipment list mechanics, what is the Bag of Holding but a gameplay device intended to produce much the same experience as BitD, but with an in-fiction process gloss cast over it?

Yep. I've repeatedly found that my players really drive hard to finding/buying/crafting a bag of holding in D&D so that they can skip over the inventory mini-game. I find it very odd that the game devotes so much page space to items weights and sizes and to encumbrance rules (5e has two separate encumbrance options!) only to add an item that makes such things largely pointless. I mean, you could overload the bag by having a lot of stuff the players want to take, but then it's pretty easy to weed without serious hard choices except for the gameplay time it takes to do so. D&D does this often with magic items -- short out entire sections of rules or radically change gameplay. Not that this is bad, per se, but it is odd that they'd build in these mechanics only to discard them when the appropriate item is acquired. Flying is kinda the same way.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I always took the bag of holding and similar items as being rewards for progressing through the game. Usually, you didn’t get that kind of stuff right away. So it was a kind of “Guess what? You don’t have to deal with this tedious game element anymore!”

Which, honestly, seems to me like a pretty glaring sign that some design change is in order.

 

[hawkeyefan]

This does nothing to change what I said. All of that is mechanics being tied to the attack. One is effectively the other. An attack without a mechanic does nothing. A mechanic without being in the fiction does nothing. Saying "But realism is only the fiction and not mechanics!" is playing a semantical game.


This is untrue. A mechanic in which an attack only happens when my cat farts is a lot less realistic than one in which an attack happens when a player declares his PC attacks with a sword and uses 5e attack mechanics.

Actually, those things are equally realistic. Cats fart and people roll dice.

But at this point, I don’t think you’re ever going to see the point, so I’ll stop going on about it.

 

[pemerton]

I always took the bag of holding and similar items as being rewards for progressing through the game. Usually, you didn’t get that kind of stuff right away. So it was a kind of “Guess what? You don’t have to deal with this tedious game element anymore!”

Which, honestly, seems to me like a pretty glaring sign that some design change is in order.

My guess is that, in its original incarnation, the Bag of Holding was an opportunity to earn more XP by carrying out more loot. Whereas it's function as an inventory circumventor was perhaps a by-product - and for the first player who thought of it, a clever piece of skilled play!

In post-loot versions of D&D (ie everything since AD&D 2nd ed), thoguh, that side-effect function changes to become a primary function. Which then creates the weird phenomenon you describe, of being rewarded for playing the game by not having to play (this part of) the game anymore.

Just write a game thats fun to play!

 

[Maxperson]

Actually, those things are equally realistic. Cats fart and people roll dice.

But at this point, I don’t think you’re ever going to see the point, so I’ll stop going on about it.

Okay thanks, because no, no they aren't.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Question here: does the character have - or it is allowed to have - the ability to plan incorrectly? Can a player intentionally make sub-optimal decisions if so desired, or can the game handle a character who is simply scatterbrained or forgetful or who fills his backpack with romance novels instead of adventuring gear? If yes, good; the follow-up question then being how does the game deal with this either mechanically or otherwise?

It could, sure. It’s not meant to, but there’s no reason you couldn’t select all your gear prior to the score and have that gear be less useful.

The game does push players towards involving their characters flaws....each PC has a vice that influences them, and if they allow it to complicate matters for them, they get XP. PCs Could also suffer traumas through play, which will have a lasting negative impact on their personality.

I suppose this could manifest as devoting inventory space to less useful gear. For example, a PC with the Paranoid trauma might feel the need to carry around a ledger that details exactly how everyone is out to get him, or something similar.

If it otherwise makes no sense that the character would be carrying such a thing, then yes it does.

Sure...that’s why I mentioned edge cases. But what we’re talking about is a criminal pulling out some gear to help commit a crime. Not remotely unexpected stuff.

The problem with using movies or TV shows as a comparison is this: time. A movie or TV show only has a limited time in which to tell its story and thus skipping details is a necessary and constant evil; and any significant prop is expected to come into use at some point. The gadgets Q gives James Bond always turn out to be exactly what he needs, which has always over-stretched my credulity. But an RPG has no such time limits and no such expectations for the mandated use of significant props, and thus is open to going into far more detail and-or trial and error.

Well my gaming time is not infinite, so I don’t agree with you there. Also, I don’t think that’s the sole reason that we typically don’t see characters in fiction agonizing over the choices of what gear to bring. It’s not very entertaining in most cases, and it’s more dramatic for the audience to not know.

Your score-in-Doskvol example is excellent for this. If I'm the player immersed in my character I'll know that every piece of gear I have access to might mean the difference between life and death, never mind the difference between pulling off the score or not; and so in-character I want to carefully choose (and-or procure) that gear based on what my research/casing/scouting has told me I'm likely getting into. By the same token, every piece of gear I don't carry makes me lighter and more nimble, which might also make the difference between life and death etc. as above...and so I also have to consider that trade-off. And I might unintentionally make wrong choices, which could come back to bite me.

Yeah....all that can still happen in the game. These decisions are constantly coming up throughout play. When your PC runs into the wall he has to scale, he has to decide if the climbing gear is worth the inventory space. If he thinks it is, he marks it off and the character uses it. If not....if he thinks there’ll be other things he’ll need more, then he doesn’t take the climbing gear, and the character decides to look for another way around the wall.

So far, my BitD game has yielded much more meaningful decision points regarding gear. Each character has a good sized list to choose from, but only a few spaces. Where as I think in D&D, each character is more likely to be carrying around the full list of items, and never really has a decision to make. They just bring everything they have with them at all times.

Having a mechanic do all this for you is nice and convenient, but it doesn't seem to allow for wrong choices except as a post-hoc explanation for a failure (effect dictates cause; something I really don't like at all); where I'd rather see things done sequentially such that the gear choices - right or wrong - are made first, followed by playing out the actual score attempt (cause dictates effect).

I can understand that preference. I think you’d be surprised at how the BitD mechanic actually feels when you play it out. All my D&D players reacted similarly; at first they balked at the idea (“seems odd to not pick gear ahead of time”), then they saw it in play and thought it was something to exploit (“well we can just pick whatever gear we want at any time”), then they finally realized that it gave them flexibility and choice....but that their choices could have consequences.

Cool!

Yup!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I always took the bag of holding and similar items as being rewards for progressing through the game. Usually, you didn’t get that kind of stuff right away. So it was a kind of “Guess what? You don’t have to deal with this tedious game element anymore!”

Which, honestly, seems to me like a pretty glaring sign that some design change is in order.

Right, it seems very weird. OTOH if you go back to D&D ca 1976, then it isn't quite so weird. I mean, the game was mostly about nothing but hauling around a bunch of gear and combining it with some spells, to defeat some traps/kobolds/whatever and then haul out the max loot. So Bag of Holding is kinda the ultimate hack. But ALL the magic items are really game hacks. They are all cheats. Potion of Healing lets you cheat on your hit points, +1 chain mail on your AC (and encumbrance!), etc. Some of the more interesting items move more into the realm of plot or just 'being gear themselves'. You can still look at them as game hacks.

The conceptual framework of D&D is no more complex than something like 'Bards Tale'. It just has a DM and thus open-ended situations, and the potential for the players to actually express some personality, though that rarely helps them win.

2e, or more properly OA, breaks that mold, but you still to this day see a lot of people's concept of play has not really evolved much beyond the 'stocked dungeon' as model play paradigm.

 

[pemerton]

The conceptual framework of D&D is no more complex than something like 'Bards Tale'. It just has a DM and thus open-ended situations, and the potential for the players to actually express some personality, though that rarely helps them win.

2e, or more properly OA, breaks that mold, but you still to this day see a lot of people's concept of play has not really evolved much beyond the 'stocked dungeon' as model play paradigm.

This!

 

[Lanefan]

Why? Considering all that has been written here, why do you insist this somehow adds to your sense of realism in the game?

I could go on for ages answering this, but it's late so I'll just give the Reader's Digest version.

Why does this add to my sense of realism? Simply put, because reality happens sequentially. Time only moves in one* direction. Therefore realism suggests you do things at the table in a sequence based on the time sequence in the fiction: you choose your gear first because that is what happens first, and then you attempt the score. (and before any of that you do your research/casing/etc. to inform your gear choices, among other things)

Playing through the score first and then blaming failure post-hoc on choice of gear is unrealistic and inauthentic for two reasons: first, there's no way of knowing what the player/character would actually have chosen (as opposed to whatever the failure result said she didn't have) had she been able to do her own choosing; and second, because it goes backward in time in the fiction and puts the effect before the cause.

* - if the particular game/campaign has established that its fictional time behaves abnormally then all bets are off; but such campaigns are rather uncommon I think.

If the above makes no sense, let me know and I'll try again when I'm more awake.