NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8955654" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Surely not. The game is more than just you. Yes, you provide the context and enable it to come alive, but if it is exclusively you and nothing else, there would be no rulebooks and no players. Since there are both of these things, and you clearly care about both of these things, the game is more than just you.Everything? So the players have no input? (Rhetorical. I know they do. I am challenging your assertion that the game begins and ends with you and never includes anything else.)But you make those changes within the limits of rules, don't you? You don't just arbitrarily rewrite things on a whim, without rhyme or reason, without sense or sensibility? Those things, the consistencies, the rhymes and reasons, the sense and sensibility, are the game. They exist beyond you, they have to, otherwise the whole thing is nothing more than "DEFCON 1's surrealist fiction displayed for a private audience." I know you aren't doing that, so there must be more to it.I never said otherwise.But, again, there are rules, limits. You aren't allowed to just declare "rocks fall, everyone dies, game over" for no reason. Likewise, just showing up one day and declaring the players have "won D&D," puppies and fairy cakes and rainbows for all, would not be permitted. To "adapt," there must be conditions you adapt to. Those conditions are the game, and can be learned.No. It assumes that there are consistencies. That doesn't mean every DM is identical. It means that a given DM, with a given ruleset, and a given group, will have patterns and principles. These can be learned. Some few of these things may generalize to all games, but that is not guaranteed. What is worthwhile in one campaign may be fruitless in another. Each campaign is its own learning process. (And even there, one can still gain learning: learning how to learn a given game better, faster, more fully.)And yet there is often much that is the same. I don't deny that there are differences. But there are always some similarities because it is ultimately a collaborative (even if it need not be cooperative) experience involving conflict, challenge, investigation, and creative problem-solving. Managing conflict (be it violent or peaceful), overcoming challenges (whatever their nature), investigating and acquiring information (whatever methods are relevant), and creatively solvong problems (whatever those problems may be) are skills. These skills can be learned.Moreover, there is the moral element. Even if the game is openly eschewing passing any moral judgments on any participants (PC or NPC), roleplay provides a toy model for experiencing ethical questions and facing difficult moral quandaries safely. This, too, is a form of learning, and many games actually make a point of it (there are few things as satisfying as bringing deserved comeuppance or achieving true atonement for wrongs done, for instance, even in deeply morally grey works, e.g. Avatar: the Last Airbender.)Correct. Learning how to play includes learning how to adapt to changing contexts. An incredibly useful skill well outside D&D.But surely there is some consistency, no? Surely this is not dream-logic where for no reason other than because you can, object permanence is hazy at best and physical properties waver and disappear and "the truth" becomes a hilarious joke, where fire becomes cold and ice burns you simply by visiting the next room over and for no reason other than that?Because if you do give reasons for this sort of change, if you do expect internal consistency, the "ontological inertia" I spoke of, then that is where the learning lies. I struggle to believe that you rewrite all of reality for no reason at all every other corridor, and thus don't really buy that there is nothing to learn.Does that mean you never, ever bother to remember any ruling you have ever made, forgetting each one the instant it is decided? Again, I cannot believe that this is so. Hence, even if you recognize that perfection is unattainable, you still value consistency, and likely to a high degree.No. All in the name of consistency, which is all you need to begin learning.Yes. It empowers them to pursue the best success they can. If brute, straightforward success is their only goal, they will be better-equipped to seek it; if it is not their only goal, if they care about more complicated or nuanced things, it empowers them to make well-informed decisions about what they are willing to sacrifice. Perhaps giving up the easy tactical advantage in order to protect the innocent is more important than securing victory regardless of the collateral damage.Whether, and how, the players succeed should always affect the story. Their choices are the story.If a player chooses to play for this reason, that is their prerogative. Far be it for me to judge them for it. But this is entirely irrelevant to my goals.Learning to play does not mean you always play optimally. It means that, when you play, whether optimally or not, it is by choice, clear-eyed. There will always be uncertainty (dice, differing human opinions, character and/or player ignorance, etc.) But learning to play well improves your ability to confidently choose what truly matters to you, even if it means paying some kind of price to do so....is not learning to play the game. It is learning the rules. I explicitly said—as you quoted!—that the game is more than either the rules or the DM. The rules are the absolute barebones starting point; they are the baseline from which things proceed. That doesn't mean they cannot ever change, but how they change is important. The DM is vital to play, I don't want to ever deny or minimize that, but if the game is reduced to "sweet-talk the DM"/"read the DM's mind," then there is no game, just playing armchair psychologist with an autocratic godhead.No: using them to decide what outcomes matter most. Perhaps striving to make them all come up roses will be some players' goal. It won't be everyone's. If the group has done a good job building and developing a compelling story, other goals will almost certainly be more compelling.Then you have ignored the core of what I said. I did speak of this, in the post you quoted.Note the bolded words: on occasion. That is exactly what I speak of. They are choosing this path, because it serves a higher, more worthy goal than brute success. But surely knowing what you intend do, and why what you do will have the effects it has, is valuable? You don't want them to be accidentally self-sabotaging all the time, do you?Not at all. It will empower them, by knowing the actual cost of the choices they make. It will be an intentional choice, not an ignorant blunder.Again, this paints choosing to do something despite knowing what it will cost as somehow discarding that knowledge. This is incorrect. Choosing to do something despite knowing the cost means making an informed sacrifice. The knowledge serves by making the choice more meaningful.If a man happens to trip and fall upon a live grenade, saving his comrades' lives, we do not think him a noble hero, we think him an almost pitiable figure, albeit one whose pitiable death at least did something good. Conversely, if a man knows that he will be leaving a wife and child at home with no father, but that by diving on that grenade he will spare (at least!) four other children that fate, and he chooses to save his comrades nonetheless, that doesn't mean he may as well have never learned to value his wife and child; it means he understands the sacrifice he is making, knows exactly how much pain he will cause those he loves, but chooses to accept that cost because the alternatives are simply not tolerable.Learning to play means becoming more like the solider who dives onto the grenade because he knows exactly what he is sacrificing and accepts it, and becoming less like the soldier who trips and falls into a grenade without ever considering the consequences.But you can achieve every single one of these goals without ever fudging. That is my whole point here.There is no useful goal that can be achieved with fudging that cannot also be achieved without it.Take, for instance, your "softening a crit" example. If you are genuinely certain that allowing that crit is going to ruin someone's night...you don't have to allow it! But you also don't have to fudge it either. There is a third option: diegetically altering the result.Ragnar: "I swing my axe wide, hoping to catch more than one of the undead warriors in one blow." [dice clatter, actions are resolved] "Fifteen damage to the first, seven to the second."DM: "Your axe swings true, but these things are clearly empowered by a strong necromancer; even with broken bones and torn flesh, they press on, ghostly magic filling their many stinking wounds. They swing at you and..." [dice clatter. The second attack is a crit.]Ragnar: [Player looks fearful.]DM: "...the first attack bites deep, but it's survivable. The second...isn't. You have a rusted sword passing halfway through your chest, until it is brutally torn back out again. Your furs are drenched in blood and ichor, and you feel your life begin to leak out with the blood."Ragnar: "Oh...is this...the end?"DM: [smiles enigmatically] "No, it is not. Suddenly, you feel...something. Like the warmth of the forge after spelunking the frigid depths, like hot mushroom soup after a long day in the mines. It swells inside you, and you feel yourself surging back to life. You know, with absolute and incontrovertible certainty, that you should be dead. But you are not. Stand and fight, Ragnar. Someone...or some*thing*...has smiled on you this night."Ragnar: "But...but what?"DM: "Guess you need to live long enough to find out, eh?"The crit happened. The character should be dead. The character and the player know this. And yet, Ragnar lives. Why? Perhaps the DM already knew beforehand. Perhaps they still do not know. Perhaps they invented something on the spot. Whatever it is, it will create a brand-new story, and the player gets to feel both the crushing defeat, just for a moment, and the thrill of barely holding on...and further, the concern about who or what might have done this for (or to?) Ragnar.There are also other methods. This one is not appropriate for all situations. It is quite versatile, but is not the one and only non-fudging method for dealing with "the dice generated something that would make the game worse." If, as people are so prompt to claim, fudging is truly such a rare event as to be almost unheard-of, then such diegetic intrusions should be just as rare, and thus avoid becoming a problem, especially if there are multiple other options in the toolbox.And for those who truly cannot stand such interventions...well, fudging is no less an intervention, so I expect such DMs to be the type who are, as you say, "dice absolutists."Going beyond the dice does not have to entail deception and illusionism. You can go beyond the dice without fudging.Right. And for these DMs, never going "beyond" the dice is the best choice.For those who do value narrative structure however, some kind of method of going beyond the dice is necessary. Fudging is the worst, most problematic method of going beyond the dice. Nothing productive that can be achieved with fudging cannot be achieved without it. Since other tools for going beyond the dice exist, don't have the problems fudging has, aren't any harder to implement, and actually have the potential to improve the experience through their use, what motive is there to not use them?</blockquote>

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