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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8249222" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I'll grant it's not great, though I'm not big on sports, so. When my home team gets somewhere, I pay attention; once they lose, which they usually do, I check right out. So....for me, the analogy seems to pretty clearly show what I'm talking about.Again, this is a different idea of "connection." You're seeing it as "having some reason to be there, at all." I'm seeing it as, "being actively involved in the process." You can't be involved unless you have a character in the game (or are DM, but that's not relevant here). You can spectate, but spectating isn't being "connected" to the game as I meant the term.Yes. One of those things means player involvement. The other doesn't, unless you have a character.Except they...aren't? A gamble is where you've wagered something, or you're playing for money or similar prizes. D&D, in general, isn't a game played for that kind of thing. I'm sure actual gambling happens with D&D, but that's pretty rare.You're certainly needing to manage probability. But there are all sorts of things where you have to account for the effect of chance, that aren't gambling. And certainly they don't all reduce to a roulette wheel, which is pretty clearly the implication here.Crits, sort of; fumbles, absolutely never. I loathe fumble rules. Crits are a "sort of" because default Dungeon World doesn't have them (rolling 10+ just means success without complication), but I've invented rules for superlative success (rolling 13+) which are more or less crits. They don't tend to add raw damage per se, but more allow fantastic, impressive, or ongoing success.The problem is that randomly generating content isn't enough. If you just used a very simple RNG to generate a new world, you'd have a horrific nightmare mess of a layout, because actually random things rarely "look right" or make sense. You at least know that Minecraft has the blocks of dirt and rock and such, right? A simple RNG--one that can work at the speed you describe--would output things that fill an entire cell with random materials in every cube of space. That's not going to make hills and fields and interesting veins of rock, it's going to be a mostly-solid block of bizarrely interleaved things.To produce something that is just random enough that it can create content on demand, but structured enough that the things it outputs are (in your racing game analogy) actually roads you can drive on and that actually fit together, you have to do a LOT of work. Even the "simplicity" of a game like Minecraft requires very significant effort just to ensure that (for example) you have a relatively consistent ground level that can still slope up or have cliffs or holes or whatever. Things that seem trivially obvious to humans can be fiendishly difficult to code a computer to do. I'd actually say that the more simple and boneheaded a thing seems, the more likely it is that it will be very hard to code, because computers do not think and cannot apply judgment or sensibility or reason to their calculations.That's....not cheating. If it were cheating, anyone who ever caused a foul would be removed from professional play, maybe forever. Or at least fined a bunch. "Cheating" is an extremely serious offense. Committing a foul or similar such things can quite easily be a strategic move. "Cheating" means something far more than that, it's fundamentally dishonest and harmful to the spirit of the game. Fouling an opponent, in and of itself, is not harmful to the spirit of the game. Cheating is morally wrong. Unless a player is being particularly heinous with fouls (e.g. trying to actually injure a fellow player), there's no moral weight to mere fouls.And, again, these ideas have no comparison whatsoever in D&D. You can't "foul" another player, there's not even the vaguest concept of it. But you absolutely can cheat, such as falsifying dice rolls or "accidentally" forgetting to record damage that would kill your character. Are you saying people SHOULD do these things????So, you would have absolutely no problem with a player secretly using weighted dice that ensure he crits 50% of the time, as long as he never gets caught using that die? You would be completely fine with a player who edits her character sheet to increase her AC when she feels like it, and always shaves off five damage when reducing her HP, as long as no one noticed during play?I'm honestly, deeply shocked that you are legitimately suggesting that cheating is a perfectly acceptable behavior and if people don't engage in it, they're self-sabotaging idiots.It's been a bit now, but: I still don't understand how this principle is relevant to what I'd said at the time, which was (1) I would find it highly disrespectful for a player to treat my gesture of positivity, which I openly told them was such a thing, as an invitation to flagrantly abuse the hell out of it; (2) I don't kill off characters just randomly, despite allowing the dice to give uncertainty, because I-as-DM decide what options the dice are allowed to pick between, and thus don't let the dice feature "character permadeath" as an option; and (3) I don't understand how you DON'T see "aha, exploit this for EVERY LAST DROP!!" as deeply disrespectful to someone trying to be nice to you.It would be like if I had initially said, "I'll buy a meal for a homeless person if they need one, whatever restaurant they'd like," and then you replied, "Aha, so I just have to order thousands of dollars worth of food!" Then, when I tell you that response is disrespectful, you respond with, "Well, the bank is the ultimate authority on how much you can spend." Like....okay?? Yes, that's true, but it seems entirely irrelevant to whether or not it's incredibly rude and disrespectful to take an offer of a nice meal when you're down on your luck and turn it into "sap this dweeb of every penny he has."Likely different. I can handle SOME joking. But if a so-called friend "insults me all day long," I will eventually take it personally, and I probably won't consider that person a friend that much longer. Beyond that, though, if someone actively twists my words and exploits my generosity for absolute maximum personal benefit, damn the rationality of it? Yeah, I'm not going to be that person's friend anymore. And I don't think I'm being excessive when I say that that's the kind of thing I expect someone to do to people they literally couldn't care less about.Then you are highly unusual, in my experience. The vast majority of people, when "called out" in public, will feel they are being publicly shamed, and that you are personally attacking them. I am (and I know this is sort of a running theme here) really really REALLY surprised that you've never had a problem with someone else because of this.Of course, I also speak honestly with people, and maintain confidentiality if requested, but otherwise just speak plainly. I don't hide things well from anyone, let alone my friends, so I just stick to the truth, or don't speak.The game I'm running now is the longest game I've participated in, period. I've had other games run into the 2-ish-years range, but definitely none of them have hit three.I mean, that can also result from missing a roll. I just don't tend to do that sort of thing, because I don't...really like doing that? I could, but I'd rather not. Now, if there were solid in-fiction reasons for it--especially if the player had already been warned they were taking a risk--then I could see it, one of those "you were warned, now it's time to pay the piper" situations. But otherwise, yeah, I don't tend to just rip items away from players for no reason. I tend to favor the "signature items" type situation anyway, where players only really HAVE a small number of personally important items, not all of which need be very powerful. That further reduces my enthusiasm for just destroying items outright, because it's more of a big deal if you lose one of your three signature magic items than if you lose one of your 17 magic items that the game's math expects you to have (looking at you, 3.x!)Yeah, it's definitely different. In an instigator-heavy game, I would almost certainly need to have a firmer hand on the tiller, as it were. In this one, it's basically the opposite; I have to encourage them to try things.Oh, I don't use my game as therapy at all. I just know that the issues I've mentioned are really hard to "leave at the door," because they strike pretty deeply into the very thoughts of the person in question. An abuse survivor is going to have a visceral response to other people being abused, that's basically unavoidable and I don't really think it's fair of me to ask an abuse survivor to (as it were) "conceal, don't feel." A player who has had a miscarriage, for an alternative example, is almost certainly going to be very sensitive about how pregnant NPCs are treated, so it's just not realistic to say, "Hey, that horribly painful event that happened to you last year? yeah don't think about that when we play. Even if something happens in-game that totally should remind you of it, just...stop those thoughts, alright?"I do, however, try to make a game that (a) is unlikely to dredge up unpleasant personal memories or draw out personal anxiety, and (b) offers chances for the players to be more than they are IRL without being overly harsh when that doesn't pay off. (I can still be harsh, but there's a difference between "downer ending" and rubbing the players' faces in it, if that makes sense.) I'm fairly certain, for example, that defeating the Song of Thorns was a very cathartic experience for one of my players. I didn't plan that fight with even the whiff of a speculation of an intent to make it a cathartic experience for that player; I planned it based on what made sense, the threat level of the spirit in question, and the resources they had and/or could yet acquire. That it (probably) ended up a cathartic experience was a very nice perk.Okay. How does that square with your "ooh, now I can jump into lava" concept? Because that strikes me as blatantly out-of-character.I mean, I am still actually willing to have a character die--they just would continue playing that character while it's dead, or while in some other environment, or whatever. That's Separate the Characters, for one, but for two, it's a potentially super interesting direction to take things. Like Zagreus fighting his way out of Hades!</blockquote>

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