D&D General DM Authority

[Helldritch]

I don't think that's really true, though. One could easily write a dramatic story of a football game.

You would focus on at least a couple of players, and write about their internal thoughts and feelings. You'd contextualize the struggle of this particular game within the context of, for example, the league standings, any historical rivalry between the teams, any reasons for grudges among the players (did Ronaldo get a red card for fouling McKesson last time these two teams met? Is McKesson looking for revenge?), etc. The basic elements of drama are there, and are many of the same ones announcers use to hype up the game and increase excitement and audience engagement.

I do think RPGs lend themselves a bit more easily to being converted into a dramatic story, but that's in part because of the subject matter; our characters are usually participating in scenarios based on either pulp adventure stories or epic fantasies.

Of course, a dry retelling of an RPG game session focusing on the mechanical details of combat would be no more intesting a tale than a recap of a football game that just focused on the scores and key statistics.

If you talk about the players and not the game. It is a drama in a football game. It is not a story about a football game. It becomes a story about football players, and that story I would read. But a story about the game would pretty much limit itself to which player did a touch down, how many verges were made in each attempts, who intercepted whom and yaddi yadda. Again, booooring.

A role playing game will not limit itself to rolled dice as characters's motivations are integrated into the game. It is a role playing game and though a full recap of who rolled what against whom or what would be pretty boring, the telling of characters interactions with their enemies and their friends could and would lend themselves perfectly in a novel. As the results of dice are not numerical value but become hits and misses with different effects and results. Even the characters' speech can transfert into a nice narrative.

This is not the case with football.

 

[FrogReaver]

If you talk about the players and not the game. It is a drama in a football game. It is not a story about a football game. It becomes a story about football players, and that story I would read. But a story about the game would pretty much limit itself to which player did a touch down, how many verges were made in each attempts, who intercepted whom and yaddi yadda. Again, booooring.

A role playing game will not limit itself to rolled dice as characters's motivations are integrated into the game. It is a role playing game and though a full recap of who rolled what against whom or what would be pretty boring, the telling of characters interactions with their enemies and their friends could and would lend themselves perfectly in a novel. As the results of dice are not numerical value but become hits and misses with different effects and results. Even the characters' speech can transfert into a nice narrative.

This is not the case with football.

how does one talk about a football game without talking about the players? I mean come on!

 

[jasper]

how does one talk about a football game without talking about the players? I mean come on!

Fred the cannibal football cares not for the players. But for the toes which he will consume!

 

[Maxperson]

If you talk about the players and not the game. It is a drama in a football game. It is not a story about a football game. It becomes a story about football players, and that story I would read. But a story about the game would pretty much limit itself to which player did a touch down, how many verges were made in each attempts, who intercepted whom and yaddi yadda. Again, booooring.

A role playing game will not limit itself to rolled dice as characters's motivations are integrated into the game. It is a role playing game and though a full recap of who rolled what against whom or what would be pretty boring, the telling of characters interactions with their enemies and their friends could and would lend themselves perfectly in a novel. As the results of dice are not numerical value but become hits and misses with different effects and results. Even the characters' speech can transfert into a nice narrative.

This is not the case with football.

I don't really agree with that. If talking about football players makes it a drama story about football players, and not the game, then talking about the PCs makes D&D a story about the PCs and not the game.

You don't need to play D&D with character motivations, so I disagree that those are integrated into the game. I've known players and games who play D&D as a game, with player motivations and not character motivations. I prefer to play with character motivations, but it is not required to play D&D and you don't have to do anything to pull those motivations out of the game. Hence no integration.

 

[Maxperson]

Fred the cannibal football cares not for the players. But for the toes which he will consume!

Since only the kickers actually contact him with toes, I'm going to go with punter/kicker.

 

[Helldritch]

how does one talk about a football game without talking about the players? I mean come on!

X player did y. Of course. You can not by pass that. But x player's motivation, hopes, frustrations and relational problems with his parents, wife or whatever are not in the game. Whereas those are in the Role of role playing games. Must I point everything every time? A true story needs those. A football game gleefully ignore these.

 

[Helldritch]

I don't really agree with that. If talking about football players makes it a drama story about football players, and not the game, then talking about the PCs makes D&D a story about the PCs and not the game.

You don't need to play D&D with character motivations, so I disagree that those are integrated into the game. I've known players and games who play D&D as a game, with player motivations and not character motivations. I prefer to play with character motivations, but it is not required to play D&D and you don't have to do anything to pull those motivations out of the game. Hence no integration.

Without these, it stops being a role playing game. And Frogreaver is 100% right at that point. But D&D is a role playing game. No role, no D&D but a simple hack and slash game. At that point, play a video game. At least you won't wait for a DM and you will be able to play zounds of hours in a row.

 

[Lanefan]

On the bolded part, the opposite is true for me. Not all fighters with a 16 con are going to be identically hard to kill off with regard to hit points. Variable hit points is a more realistic system than static hit points.

My guess is the poster meant variable between levels, i.e. the difference in hit points between a 2nd-level fighter and a 10th-level fighter even though to an observer they both just look like warriors.

 

[happyhermit]

If I was playing for world versimillitude, a number of the mechanics would jar me out pretty regularly, including level variable hit points and the deliberate vagueness of what a strike means (there are also some problems with how the magic works there). Yes, I'm realizing that there are ways to rationalize these as abstractions, but overly high-order abstractions that if looked at close seem to state counterfactuals are not things I'd find would reinforce that.

Yeah, I've not seen those be problems tied to the perspective I was referring to. They don't want things to happen in-fiction that force them out of making decisions in-character, and they don't want it to be impossible to imagine that the world is not mercurial (guess I couldn't find a worse way to say this?). If another player can (from outside the fiction), change the world in-play (as opposed to behind the scenes or when the GM does it), they can't have the feeling of a versimilitudinous world.

I think the things you mention are more theoretical issues for people who enjoy rules and crunch, that would rarely if ever pull a person with the preferences I mentioned, out of immersion during Actual Play. And on the rare cases it does it usually has more to do with how the GM integrate the rules and fiction.

I mean, I am not sure what you mean by level variable hit points, but how often does this come up in actual play, in-fiction, that it makes the world seem incoherent? Could the GM have described things in a way that made sense? Not sure where the issue comes up as I haven't seen it. Assuming you mean "hit" as opposed to "strike", I have seen some issues here, but it just requires the GM to describe things in a way that works.

D&D is by no means perfect for this type of play, but neither is any system, on the whole I have had the best experience (with this type of play) using some versions of D&D. Of course D&D isn't perfect for any type of play (nor is any game), certainly not more player authorial style which it doesn't even claim to support without optional rules and which MANY other games are explicitly designed to handle.

 

[Jack Daniel]

You don't need to play D&D with character motivations, so I disagree that those are integrated into the game. I've known players and games who play D&D as a game, with player motivations and not character motivations. I prefer to play with character motivations, but it is not required to play D&D and you don't have to do anything to pull those motivations out of the game. Hence no integration.

Without these, it stops being a role playing game. And Frogreaver is 100% right at that point. But D&D is a role playing game. No role, no D&D but a simple hack and slash game. At that point, play a video game. At least you won't wait for a DM and you will be able to play zounds of hours in a row.

Emphatically not true, @Helldritch. It's not only 100% viable to play D&D without character motivations that differ from player motivations—and extremely fun!—it's also arguably the original way that D&D was intended by its creators to work.