Daggerheart "Description on Demand" a GM DON'T

[Micah Sweet]

I guess I wouldn't have a problem with it either. About the only thing I could say to that player would be "then you're going to be very frustrated at my table" and let it sort itself out.

With a fundamental disconnect like that, it's probably best if the player left the group to find a more compatible table. It's not really something the DM can change. (Of course this is all hypothetical; I've never been in a position where a player flatly refused to contribute to the narrative when prompted. I suppose it could happen someday, but it sounds unpleasant.)

Fair enough. Insisting on said contribution sounds just as unpleasant to me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Put another way (and maybe he didn't mean it this harshly, but my read of that quote gets this impression):

Alexander: Hey kid, you like Ice cream?

Kid 1: Oh ick, Ice cream is worse than bugs.
Alexander: Ice cream is unhealthy. It shall be my personal mission in life to ensure you never have Ice Cream

Kid 2: I love Ice cream, it's the best.
Alexander: Ice cream is unhealthy. It shall be my personal mission in life to ensure you never have Ice Cream

He could have just led with "Death to all the Ice Cream heretics!" and been done.

Maybe just let the second kid have their Ice Cream...

The second can have their ice cream. But Alexander is under no obligation either to serve it to them, or sing it's praises.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This thread makes me really wonder what 2025-'Justin Alexander' thinks of Daggerheart, given that 2020-'Justin Alexander' raged against what would become one of Daggerheart's core ideas.

Does he hold the same opinion today as he did then. Has it changed in one direction or the other and if so why and how? Has he tried games like Daggerheart and Mist that make this concept central to their identity as 'storytelling games'?

It would be interesting to see if ha has a different view of the idea now given that we're debating his stance from 5 years ago.

Is Justin Alexander a proponent of storygames? I'm not deeply familiar with his discourse. Mostly just heard of the guy and his website.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't think these things are at odds. At least, for me they aren't. I am a proponent of "situations not plots" and I don't think player authored elements impinge on.that in any way.

Except in the example the players said they were pulled out of the perspective of their character.

 

[Kichwas]

The second can have their ice cream. But Alexander is under no obligation either to serve it to them, or sing it's praises.

Sure and that's where we might have preferences differences.

Alexander isn't here in this thread to explain his blog from 5 years ago and it is in that way kind of unfair to him that we're ripping it apart in here...

BUT...

He did say doing this style wasn't just not his preference.

He called it bad GMing.

He went that extra step beyond a preference to saying people not like him were bad at GMing. Those two claims after all - are very different. Preference vs 'you are bad at it if you do that'.

Of course again - the caveat is that he's not here in this thread and that WAS 5 years ago...

So I have no idea if he really means today to claim that GMs who use 'description on demand' are doing bad GMing, or if they're doing just a style he's not into.

I've been online since the late 80s so I know personally that it is extremely annoying to be held to something you wrote YEARS AGO...

So while we keep quoting him, and I've even been saying 'he has this stance'... Let me walk that back a little and say we're using this old opinion of his ONLY as a reference point to a concept.

I'm going to TRY to not hold an opinion of him over it.

BUT the stance itself - it's a preference. Daggerheart is aimed at folks who have a preference FOR 'description on demand' but can hold up even for players that don't.

As another aside. I'm also getting into Legend in the Mist right now and I suspect it NEEDS description on demand just to even function. But I'm still reading it.

 

[Reynard]

Except in the example the players said they were pulled out of the perspective of their character.

That's not a function of situations versus plots versus freeform.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I've been in the hobby since 1980 with a many year break from about 2005 until late 2022... Back in the day systems just weren't written for this kind of gameplay so I system shopped a lot, hit burnout often, and anything past the rules was often done on the fly. But it's also why I never thought to just ask my players to fill in things directly, and yet always tried to hint at it. The idea just didn't finish crossing the gap for me.

I spent the last few years struggling with Pathfinder 2E which frankly was a poor match to this part of my personality.

I do very much like a structured set of rules I can run 'rules as written', and a lot of lore. And PF2E provides those two things. It also has a lot of published adventures with some very interesting stories. And that's where the break kept happening. Because my improv instinct and my desire to have players fill things in went against that to such a degree that I was near burnout by the time Daggerheart came about because I'd completely missed that 'PbtA' even existed. I've still never seen an 'Actual' PBtA game unless 'Legend in the Mist' counts (but I was in another topic today, I think on reddit, where people were noting that 'Mist' is an evolution away from PBtA and more towards narrative, so I don't know...).

Back in the day, 20 years ago. I was running mostly Hero System, GURPS, and then Mutants and Masterminds and I kept 'chafing' against various things. I liked the system in Hero a lot, but as each edition came out it just got too bulky, and that bulk made me more and more aware of fundamentals that existed even in older editions that I no longer cared for. But I more or less ran my games 'full improv'.

I always felt GURPS wasn't generic enough because it had a strongly typed magic system and later a strongly typed super power system.

M&M worked for a while, until it didn't.

I've got two interests that are likely seen as conflicting by other people:

• I want tightly constructed rules where I know exactly what the RAW answer is to a question and don't want to have to let in any 'house rules'.
• I want plots, lore, story, characters, and such to be 'in the moment fluid' with a lot of group involvement over the crafting of them. I don't just want "player agency", I want them doing a lot of running the show. To me it's a group thing. Not my story, but out story.

I met the first interest very well with Pathfinder 2E, but over time it came at the cost of the second as I kept making what for me was the mistake of using published material.

Right now I'm on break from GMing, and putting my GMing style back together. I know I'm moving on from Pathfinder. I'm landing on either or both of Daggerheart and Mist Engine (Legend in the Mist and Otherscape).

Sounds like you spent a lot of time trying and largely failing to find a game that suits your GMing style. Sorry to hear that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's not a function of situations versus plots versus freeform.

What does that have to do with the thread topic?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure and that's where we might have preferences differences.

Alexander isn't here in this thread to explain his blog from 5 years ago and it is in that way kind of unfair to him that we're ripping it apart in here...

BUT...

He did say doing this style wasn't just not his preference.

He called it bad GMing.

He went that extra step beyond a preference to saying people not like him were bad at GMing. Those two claims after all - are very different. Preference vs 'you are bad at it if you do that'.

Of course again - the caveat is that he's not here in this thread and that WAS 5 years ago...

So I have no idea if he really means today to claim that GMs who use 'description on demand' are doing bad GMing, or if they're doing just a style he's not into.

Fair enough. I whole-heartedly agree that Alexander's opinion on the subjective should be stated as just that. None of us objective answers on these things.

 

[Kichwas]

Sounds like you spent of time trying and largely failing to find a game that suits your GMing style. Sorry to hear that.

Well people also change with time. What I liked at one point and what I liked at another are rarely the same.