D&D General Can we talk about best practices?

[Ovinomancer]

I'm guessing you've never seen a wagon then. Using your face in place of a wagon wheel would be counterproductive.

But better than nothing, surely. I also highly agree it would be counterproductive, though, much like relying on BIFTs and Inspiration to run 5e in a narrative fashion.

I would consider Critical Roll an example of a 5e narrative game.

Ah, problem solved. CR isn't a narrative game. It's a trad game. 5e does that pretty well, again, though, with little to no help from BIFTs. It does this well precisely because the GM is placed in the privileged seat for all fiction generation and most mechanics revolve around "the GM decides what happens." This gives the GM much leeway to have a very heavy, story-intensive game. That's not what a narrative game is, though, at least in every other corner of discussion that's not solely about 5e -- 5e doesn't even recognize the concept space of a narrative game. So, yeah, this clearly exposes the root of the disagreement.

 

[Mort]

I would consider Critical Roll an example of a 5e narrative game.

So this is a bit off the topic of best practices, but quite interesting!

How is Critical Role a narrative game? The players follow along on leads provided by the DM (which he often draws from their backstory and continuing story but it's 100% his choice).

Sure the players inject A LOT of flavor as they are following along the DMs path, and they have some control on the threads to follow - but I consider a narrative game one where the players can exercise some form of actual narrative control - and I've never really seen it on that show.

 

[Mort]

But better than nothing, surely. I also highly agree it would be counterproductive, though, much like relying on BIFTs and Inspiration to run 5e in a narrative fashion.

Ah, problem solved. CR isn't a narrative game. It's a trad game. 5e does that pretty well, again, though, with little to no help from BIFTs. It does this well precisely because the GM is placed in the privileged seat for all fiction generation and most mechanics revolve around "the GM decides what happens." This gives the GM much leeway to have a very heavy, story-intensive game. That's not what a narrative game is, though, at least in every other corner of discussion that's not solely about 5e -- 5e doesn't even recognize the concept space of a narrative game. So, yeah, this clearly exposes the root of the disagreement.

You know, I can think of 3 abilities that I would consider REAL narrative control:

1. Portent - the diviner ability to replace a die roll - diviner can do this to himself or anyone else;
2. The lucky feat - because you can force someone else to take your roll;
3. The Urchin background, it allows navigation at double speed through the city but leaves it to the player as to HOW. this can be very interesting with the right DM.

All 3, as limited as they are, are considered extremely powerful abilities within the context of the game (well not the Urchin one really, but it can be) and elicit massive grumbles from DMs. Very few 5e DMs, IME, actually like narrative control given to the players!

 

[Fanaelialae]

So this is a bit off the topic of best practices, but quite interesting!

How is Critical Role a narrative game? The players follow along on leads provided by the DM (which he often draws from their backstory and continuing story but it's 100% his choice).

Sure the players inject A LOT of flavor as they are following along the DMs path, and they have some control on the threads to follow - but I consider a narrative game one where the players can exercise some form of actual narrative control - and I've never really seen it on that show.

I haven't watched the show in over a year, but I can recall quite a number of times when one of the players suggested doing something extremely non-standard and Mercer rolling with it. Like a spell that wasn't in any way meant to do X, but flavorwise could hypothetically do X, doing X. Sometimes I think there might have been a check involved, but I don't recall with certainty.

Moreover, the game has a strong narrative focus. There's a story there. While some of it is emergent, a lot of it is clearly planned, and planned with the intent of telling an entertaining narrative.

FWIW, I wasn't saying that I think 5e is a narrative game. I used terms like narrative oriented or narrative focused for a reason, to distinguish my meaning from narrative games like Fate.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You know, I can think of 3 abilities two abilities that I would consider REAL narrative control:

1. Portent - the diviner ability to replace a die roll - diviner can do this to himself or anyone else.
2. The lucky feat - because you can force someone else to take your roll.
3. The Urchin background, it allows navigation at double speed through the city but leaves it to the player as to HOW. this can be very interesting with the right DM>

All 3, as limited as they are, are considered extremely powerful abilities within the context of the game (well not the Urchin one really, but it can be) and elicit massive grumbles from DMs. Very few 5e DMs, IME, actually like narrative control given to the players!

That's... surprisingly well argued. (EDIT: as in I was surprised by the argument, not surprised at your ability to argue...) What cuts against this is how silo'd these are from each other, which means that you cannot rely on this at the game level, but only at specific resolution points.

Also, the biggest argument for narrative control is just spells -- those cute little bits of narrative chunky goodness that everyone just overlooks because they've been lampshaded for so long by "because magic." I was kinda hoping someone would bring this up -- it's the best example of narrative bits in 5e (or any D&D). However, even here, the specificity of application and effect and the huge authority the GM wields over everything else (including the ability to shut these down trivially) mean that they don't actually enable narrative play, even while being narrativist elements.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I haven't watched the show in over a year, but I can recall quite a number of times when one of the players suggested doing something extremely non-standard and Mercer rolling with it. Like a spell that wasn't in any way meant to do X, but flavorwise could hypothetically do X, doing X. Sometimes I think there might have been a check involved, but I don't recall with certainty.

Moreover, the game has a strong narrative focus. There's a story there. While some of it is emergent, a lot of it is clearly planned, and planned with the intent of telling an entertaining narrative.

FWIW, I wasn't saying that I think 5e is a narrative game. I used terms like narrative oriented or narrative focused for a reason, to distinguish my meaning from narrative games like Fate.

The story is the GM's story, which is antithetical to narrative games, so that counts strongly against. The GM having the ability to allow out of box actions is similarly not in line with narrative games, but instead strong GM-centered games. This is the difference between being able to do a thing and have it stick without asking, and asking for permission from the GM to allow it.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Absolutely. That's been our rule here forever; and on the rare occasions a player takes a sheet home and forgets to bring it back next session, it's a given that said player will miss part of that session due to going home right then to get it.

When I said "keep the old [sheet]" I meant clip it to the back of the new one rather than crumple it up and throw it away, which I've seen done. (online or digitized sheets are even worse for this, as it's too easy to just edit what's there rather than create a duplicate file and edit that so as to preserve the old one).

I’m neither a technophile nor a luddite, but I’ve put most of my RPG PCs- and GM campaign designs/notes- on my portable electronic devices since I got my Palm Tungsten 2 in something like 2002. I even had blank PC sheet templates for my most commonly played RPGs.

Odds were high that I had my Palm on me until I went to sleep. And with the state of cloud computing today, if I forget my iPad, I can still access my gaming data via my iPhone.

 

[Mort]

I haven't watched the show in over a year, but I can recall quite a number of times when one of the players suggested doing something extremely non-standard and Mercer rolling with it. Like a spell that wasn't in any way meant to do X, but flavorwise could hypothetically do X, doing X. Sometimes I think there might have been a check involved, but I don't recall with certainty.

You hit a true pet peeve I have with Mercer's game. He APPEARS to give the player some control but it is an illusion (and a bad one).

Instead of saying no he says "you can certainly try..." and if the tone doesn't dissuade the player he has them roll. He never reveals the DC, but it MUST be absurdly high (or even unmake able) because the players always seem to fail these "you can certainly try..." moments.

The game is absurdly chronicled, I'll have to see if someone actually compiled the number of times one of these rolls succeeded (if ever).

Anyway - this isn't narrative control - it's barely even the appearance of it!

Now, that's not saying Mercer isn't doing an awesome job as DM and that the players aren't 1) great 2) clearly enjoying themselves too. But on this one aspect - it truly irritates me.

Moreover, the game has a strong narrative focus. There's a story there. While some of it is emergent, a lot of it is clearly planned, and planned with the intent of telling an entertaining narrative.

But the players really just roll with it - they don't TRULY add to the narrative unless the GM picks up on their story and adds it for them. They players have no meaningful mechanism of narrative control, so it's not truly a narrative game, in that sense.

 

[Fanaelialae]

You hit a true pet peeve I have with Mercer's game. He APPEARS to give the player some control but it is an illusion (and a bad one).

Instead of saying no he says "you can certainly try..." and if the tone doesn't dissuade the player he has them roll. He never reveals the DC, but it MUST be absurdly high (or even unmake able) because the players always seem to fail these "you can certainly try..." moments.

The game is absurdly chronicled, I'll have to see if someone actually compiled the number of times one of these rolls succeeded (if ever).

Anyway - this isn't narrative control - it's barely even the appearance of it!

Now, that's not saying Mercer isn't doing an awesome job as DM and that the players aren't 1) great 2) clearly enjoying themselves too. But on this one aspect - it truly irritates me.


But the players really just roll with it - they don't TRULY add to the narrative unless the GM picks up on their story and adds it for them. They players have no meaningful mechanism of narrative control, so it's not truly a narrative game, in that sense.

Again, there's a reason I was saying "narrative focused" and "narrative oriented". I wasn't suggesting that 5e supports narrative gameplay in the same respect as Fate does.

Although the features you pointed out (Portent, etc.) do indicate that 5e isn't entirely bereft of such mechanics. Personally, I love it when my players engage with such mechanics. I've seen some people suggest expanding various mechanics to further support such play (such as using Inspiration to add a new detail into the game - this isn't some random guard you encountered but actually your old war buddy Bob).

 

[el-remmen]

@el-remmen published a little newsletter/zine and I think it was titled something like "How I run the game." If I got that wrong, hopefully, el-remmen will correct me.

Thanks for the plug!

HOW I RUN IT - a quick n' dirty DnD5E zine - "I can't tell you how you should run things, but I can tell you how I run it, so I am."

Plenty of issues of #3 available (and limited numbers of issues #1 and #2)

You can follow links in this post if interested.