Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Everyone says they agree to it. Doesn't mean they really do.
D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
Why is it that you so often go to imagining bad actors as the last line of argument? "Let players define their deity's worship" goes to "but a player may do a completely non-sensical thing so we need to make sure it can't happen by not letting them do that! Save the players!" And now, "Consensus means everyone agrees to a thing." "But someone might possibly be lying, and the fact that what they lied about is agreed to and gone makes no difference because... something bad probably happens here. So, yeah, consensus is totally awful because someone might possibly lie and a maybe bad thing might happen then."Everyone says they agree to it. Doesn't mean they really do.
It's... very odd.
Right. "Bad player" is relative to expectations.
In my Torchbearer game, one of the players deliberately initiated an interaction with a NPC anticipating that it would earn him an enemy. Is that good play, or bad play? I thought it was great play - it gave me a hook for hanging a twist to a later failed Resources check (the PC's enemy had had him black-balled at the markets), it prompted a later confrontation between the two characters (initiated by the players, and shifting the terrain from scholarship (where the PC is weak) to oratory (where the PC is strong), and it gives me material for future framing and complications.
At a turtling-type table I imagine it would be considered bad play.
I will query your timelines here - I saw the sorts of expectations you describe here, about both setting and plot, back in the 90s, and they seemed well-entrenched then.
I agree that it creates unnecessary hurdles to GMing and gameplay more generally.
When I was GMing 4e, I remember a player calling me on an aspect of framing that contradicted the players' success at a skill challenge in the previous session. It was a fair call.
If a GM is doing their best to frame scenes and narrate consequences, I'll let that go even if I can see flaws in what they're doing that (to my eye) seem like they could easily be remedied. I see that as an issue of manners, rather than trust. Trust implies as-yet unrevealed consequences or competencies that can be relied upon. In the case of GMing, most of the time what you see is what you get, and so trust isn't a salient concept.
I mean, if the GM sets up a puzzle I guess I need to trust them not to have cocked up the solution, but even then there can be plenty of room for real-time back-and-forth between humans. (Eg one time I wrote a series of puzzles and codes for my daughter's birthday party. I did it late the evening before, and mucked up one of my Caesar shifts. So any trust the kids had in me was misplaced - but they worked it out anyway, noted the errors, and just made snide remarks about the incompetent dad!)
My first reply is the same as Campbell's - when I, as a player, establish the requirements of the faith as I see it, I am establishing a more universal thing across all worshippers.
There's also, of course, the possibility of various expectations across different worshippers (certainly a thing in the European paganism that tends to have inspired FRPG approaches, and also a thing in European Christianity before the big pushes for uniformity beginning around the eleventh century). This is also what @Ovinomancer suggested upthread.
For instance, the first time an extended rest was taken in my 4e campaign, the player of the paladin of the Raven Queen announced that he sleeps standing up (because only the dead lie horizontal). No one quibbled - but nor did the players of the other Raven Queen devotees take a similar view about their PCs, who slept in the normal fashion. When decisions about what the Raven Queen requires have been more high-stakes, I expect the players to work it out, perhaps in character - it's not as if its unrealistic that the adherents of a single religion might disagree about what its demands are!
This makes no sense to me. If things aren't defined ahead of time, then there is no risk of the sort of mistake you describe, which can only come about if someone - presumably the GM - decides these setting elements ahead of time.
As I posted, I generally expect the GM to provide me the latitude I would grant. Obviously granting that latitude precludes the sort of thing you're describing here.
I can't remember what I was doing back in November 2013, but I remember being busy. Maybe I was marking exams? Anyway, I don't think I've read that post before, which is why the fey thing with the Chamberlain et al caught me by surprise back then. Now it makes more sense!
This is like what I described upthread in my Torchbearer game: the PC wanted to humiliate his enemy in a debate, and we didn't worry about how the two characters were able to meet up.
In my Traveller game, the PCs include nobles. And most planets have populations below the millions - ie are the size of small sub-federal entities, or middle-sized urban areas. So if the players want to meet with important personages, we tend to cut to that without worrying too much about the minutiae of the back-and-forth of appointment books, talking to PAs/EAs, etc. Especially when time is often being tracked in days and weeks rather than minutes and hours.
I don't see this as very controversial, even though it is the player - in effect - making a decision about some aspect of the setting other than their PC. ("Non-magical mind control" FTW!)
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
Heh, that was meant to be 2e, not 4e.
I think there even was, once, an encounter where that happened, and he got the benefit of not being prone.
It came close to breaking the game, but we survived!
I'm not even sure I would have called those a player making a decision about the setting -- just the table cutting out the parts that are easy given whose trying it and getting on to the more exciting things.
Now I'm wondering about how customer service lines in Traveller work and what it takes for a character to not have to deal with them if they're anything like our ones now
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
On the consensus piece, it's because I've seen it used so many times out-of-game as a bad-faith delaying tactic - usually by the losing side in an argument or debate - that when I see it now I just assume this to be the case, and in response I push for a binding resolution now by vote or other lock-it-in means so as to cut off the backroom lobbying crap before it starts.
The minute I hear someone say "Can we just come to a consensus?", up go the red flags.
On the in-game religion piece, to me pantheons and deities etc. are part of the background setting* and thus fully under the DM's purview. Sure the DM could open this up so players could in effect build their own deities, but in my settings at least this would risk running aground in two ways:
--- all deities in all my settings work on an underlying universal chassis that players might never see or know about; a player-designed deity might run afoul of this without realizing it, meaning I'd have to keep a hard veto power
--- my pantheons are already designed intentionally so as to allow a wide variance of Cleric types and alignments to be chosen for play; and some of the "holes" left in those lineups are intentional. For example, one can play a Dwarven Nature Cleric (a.k.a. Druid) in my game but to do so said Dwarf has to go out of culture to find a deity as no Dwarven deities support that type of Cleric - what self-respecting Dwarf wants to spend time frolicking about in forests when there's good mining to be done?
. A player inventing a Dwarven nature deity to fill this hole would violate this intentional design and in so doing probably force me to come up with a completely bespoke spell list just for it; and that's a crap-ton of work I ain't about to do just for one character, thank you very much.* - the exception of course being if the PCs are deities, but I've never tried that type of game.
