They're clear in the DMG, but as was pointed out, almost no NPCs in the published adventures or monster books include Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws.
A key observation is that the DMG is only meant to be known by one player, and are also very clearly stated to be guidlines and suggestions rather than rules. It hence serves no role in setting expectations as to what the activity would entail when inviting players to "play D&D".
However the players handbook is the one book assumed to be available to everyone, and hence what is written in it is the basis of what can be reasonably expected when a group of people agree to "play D&D". This hence provide the baseline expectations. Deviations from what is written in that book should in general be clarified up front, or else you can be accused of deception.
Character creation, combat rules and content with defined interactions with these two subsystems make up the wast majority of every PHB. This is why I consider them key situations.
However there also typically are some other minor things like overland travel speeds and the light and duration characteristics of a torch. As at least minor changes to these are unlikely to have drastic effect on play, and their not so prominent place in the PHB, I think most groups will be fine with rule zeroing on these - as long as the changes is not obviously drastically changing the nature of play as advertised.
And I think the notion of advertisement is critical here. If someone join a game without knowing more about it than "we are a group playing D&D, come join!" You really do not know much about what they are doing. Hence follow up info like "we play this adventure" or "we do a home brew setting" or " we play in a colaborately created setting" is commonly expected to narrow the expectation. Indeed we have invented special vocabulary to communicating further narrowing of the activity like "pillars of play" balance, degree of character focus or "hexcrawl" vs "pontcrawl" vs "dungeon crawl". And while each of these qualifiers help with setting proper expectations for how the game will be, it is hard to compete with an entire book where an author has put their mind to accuratly trying to describe a style of play trough mechanics..
[edit] I suppose I should give my own definition of when a game is not itself. Which is... When the procedures of play and experience of play are no longer the same? Something like that?
We are just going to have to agree to disagree here. I don't think monopoly isn't monopoly because some people play with money under free parking and others don't... but according to the above... you would consider them totally different games.
Or on a larger scale there are MMO's where one person can spend the entire game fighting monsters, and interacting with other players through adventuring and looting with them... while another picks up a craft or trade, makes items, interacts with the economy and other players in a transactional nature... Totally different procedures of play, mechanics, results and enjoyment in the same game...
We are just going to have to agree to disagree here. I don't think monopoly isn't monopoly because some people play with money under free parking and others don't... but according to the above... you would consider them totally different games.
I'm not talking about money under free parking, I'm talking about changing the win conditions or whether we even move tokens on the board. There's got to be some level of change where you're not really playing Monopoly any more. Can you accept that?
I'm not talking about money under free parking, I'm talking about changing the win conditions or whether we even move tokens on the board. There's got to be some level of change where you're not really playing Monopoly any more. Can you accept that?
And here's the problem... there's a judgement in it... It's D&D until the changes made are too much for you. The problem is where everyone's line for it not being D&D is going to be different.
If a classic 1e dungeon crawl, a 5e railroad, and a radically homebrewed game are all 'playing D&D', then 'playing D&D' must mean something other than playing D&D. What kind of thing is that?
I'm not talking about money under free parking, I'm talking about changing the win conditions or whether we even move tokens on the board. There's got to be some level of change where you're not really playing Monopoly any more. Can you accept that?
Speaking for myself, this is why I first stated that these conversations are like ships passing in the night.
It's why D&D is different. Not better, not worse, but different than most other RPGs.
Most other games are narrow in scope- this is why, for the most part, it is even possible to have such a complete diffusion of authority (absent the narrow focus, it is exceptionally hard to get a shared fiction going!). But D&D (however you wish to define it) doesn't work like that.
To make it more simple-
If you are playing BiTD (which seems to be the go-to example for certain people), then you're playing a heist game. With genre-appropriate bits (like flashbacks).
If you're playing D&D, you might be involved in a heist. Or a dungeon crawl. Or a post-apocalyptic jaunt. Or a horror story. Or some spy espionage against a neighboring kingdom. Or some courtly romance. Or high-level diplomacy. Or something comedic. Or leading vast armies in mass combat.
All of that is possible, and, for that matter, all of that is quite normal for many D&D players. The usual retort is, of course, "But D&D isn't good at X." Which is true .... D&D is not particularly good at a lot of things (other than, perhaps, being D&D). But for a multitude of reasons- the history of the different editions, the history of modifying the game (going back to OD&D), the wealth of 3PP, the culture of table rules and homebrews ... D&D is spectacularly malleable.
...not just spectacularly malleable ... but exists as a product and within a culture that is calling for it to be modified to the extent that the core rules themselves are full of optional rules and variant rules.
Which goes back to why these conversations aren't fruitful. If you are the type of person who strongly believes that a game must follow certain rules to be that game, the very nature of D&D is likely to lead not just to your frustration, but also the frustration of those conversing with you. IMO, YMMV, etc.
...
If you're playing D&D, you might be involved in a heist. Or a dungeon crawl. Or a post-apocalyptic jaunt. Or a horror story. Or some spy espionage against a neighboring kingdom. Or some courtly romance. Or high-level diplomacy. Or something comedic. Or leading vast armies in mass combat.
...
1. Such difficulties, at least the way you've described them, simply don't happen in practice. If, as intended, a game of this kind starts out as "no myth," nothing is established unless it is discussed, openly, during Session Zero. Nothing, full stop--doesn't mean there isn't anything there at all, just means the group knows nothing about it. So if you never actually said that XYZ thing was part of the world...it's not (but potentially could be, if it makes sense.) And if you do say it, everyone can comment and discuss, so there's little to no issue. No one is sitting off in their own little corner tooling up everything totally in isolation.
If this stuff not done in isloation then the only time of discovery for everyone else (other than the GM who in theory knows all of this going in so as to be able to weave it together) is during that Session 0 discussion.
I was thinking 15% of the world. On Earth this might mean I get to design South America while another player gets Africa, etc.; or it might mean I get to design trade and commerce while another player gets weather and climate, another gets species and their locations, etc.
Not my intent. I meant more "15% of starting material," because you are not supposed to nail down the whole world in DW. E.g., a player (call her Alice) says her char came from Harlingast, bustling small city aspiring higher, partly due to the prestigious magic college, which the char (call 'em Perry Haughter) attends(/attended.) That by itself could be everything Alice contributes at Session Zero--I'd be quite happy. Thereafter, if Harlingast details are relevant, I have both informal ("ask questions and use the answers") and formal (the Spout Lore move) ways for player and/or GM to expand this in the open. I can also safely prep situations ("draw maps, leave blanks"--no plots, but events/conditions/etc.) that leverage Harlingast, knowing at least Perry will care about them, and the players get to explore.
Ah. I was (and still am) thinking bigger-scale. Small-scale stuff like this - the archetypal "starting town and nearby dungeon" can be banged out by an experienced DM in minutes, no player input required. I'm talking about what's beyond that town, and that town's nation, and that nation's continent.
3. If you don't have some kind of conversation like this--where the players discuss what they care about, what they wish to play, what values they have, what kinds of stories and/or story-beats they enjoy, what elements excite them--how do you as DM have any guess as to what they'll like?
Obviously, if you've been playing with a group for a long time that's useful evidence. Thing is, that is (in effect) treating all your past history with them as an unofficial, implied Session Zero that they can't alter or comment on, thus leaving lots of potential land mines.
Wouldn't it be better to sit down with them, and talk, at least at a high/abstract level, about the kinds of things they want and, perhaps, things required or implied? E.g., if one of your players wants to play a Wizard, stereotypically that means they had to get an education from somewhere--so where? Sure, you could write up the whole school all by yourself, but the player must have at least a few ideas about what that school must have been like to attend. Same goes for other characters: a Rogue likely had to practice their skills on the streets, so how did that happen, where, why, etc.? A Fighter had to learn the art of the sword, even if self-taught, so how did that happen, where, why, etc.? These things become seeds. Even if most of the backdrop of the world is ultimately written by the DM, the tendrils that grow from those seeds will spread and likely end up touching many parts of the game, almost always in ways no one (not even the players) expected initially--meaning even stuff you personally created can still lead to "discovery" and "exploration," not just flat, fiat declaration.
I see what you're getting at but IME those things tend to get filled in later, once it's been shown the character will survive and become significant (low-level play here sometimes churns through a lot of characters). And sure, players can fill in some of this themselves if they want - your Fighter's from Thamthar Hills and you want to say he cut his teeth in Duke Cadwall's militia? Great! Some players do this, others don't.
1, 3, 4, 5 (despite the statement of "non-adventure-related"), 7, and 8 are all adventure activities in Dungeon World terms. Going to somewhere that you have no idea what's there? That's (pretty clearly) Undertake a Perilous Journey--if the area is genuinely uncharted, that almost certainly means it's at least tough to reach or has something dangerous in it. That's an adventure, even if it's not of the stereotypical "delve into a murder-hole" type.
Mapping a region is an adventure if there's any danger present e.g. you have to slog through the monster-infested jungle to get there; but filling in the blanks on a map can be pretty safely done on a series of clear days by someone with flight powers (or an airship), a bit of patience and cold tolerance, and a pen and paper (or a photographic memory, or imaging telepathy such that someone on the ground can do the actual map-drawing).
Building a safe place is also totally an adventure. Baseline Dungeon World has rules for "Steadings," and another PbtA game called Stonetop is all about this sort of thing, so if the Steading rules are insufficient, you can probably burgle bits from Stonetop too.
1e D&D has stronghold rules as well, and while as written they assume there's some risk and danger involved, depending on the setting there doesn't have to be. One could put one's stronghold in a known-to-be-safe place, for example.
Or, if your intent is to take over a cleared-out dungeon as your stronghold, IMO the adventuring part is where you clear it out and the construction/moving-in part is non-adventuring.
I personally love few things more than "digging into the history or significance of items found while adventuring," so you 110% have my support on that front. One of my players is an anthropologist by training, so those sorts of questions are always up for discussion, and we have discovered a great many things along the way because of it.
The only two that might be not-exactly-adventuring are 2 and 6. 2 because "settle down and protect my family and nothing else" is...well, it's kind of a retirement condition for a D&D character. You don't go on adventures at all anymore, you're too busy being a spouse or parent, taking care of domestic issues, etc. Much like actually becoming properly the monarch of a realm or the like, where you have too many responsibilities to be delving into murder-holes.
I've a character in play who has made sure her family are well-looked-after, in a good house in a big city; but that doesn't mean she stays there with them very often. She's still a field adventurer for now, and after that hopes to dive head-first into national politics.
You would never have a DW GM saying that. Like...absolutely not ever. Instead, you would have something like the following. (spoilered for length)
Perry: "Alright, that's all my shopping done. Darren, you finished with your meditations?"
Darren: "Yes. The Platinum Dragon flows."
Kara: "I'm...going to assume that's a go. Village mayor already paid us, so unless there's anything else people want to do...?"
Jaan: (shakes head) "Adventure calls!"
GM: "Indeed it does. You guys are packed up. The horses are fed, the pack mule is loaded, a village full of bittersweet goodbyes (and perhaps a couple admirers) is almost at your back. What do you do?"
Perry: "Well, I've been looking at maps the local priest had of the surrounding area. There's a spot north of here, toward the mountains, that nobody knew anything about--that's what we found out just before we wrapped things up there. Sounds mysterious!"
Jaan: "And mysteries are full of adventure!"
GM: "Well then. Kara, your people come from mountains, just not these ones. What does a dwarf do, when exploring new Stone?"
Kara: "We...do something we don't normally do, like, ever: We climb to the top of the tallest tree, and have a lookabout."
GM: "Have you done such a climb yourself?"
Kara: "No, but my father did, when he was young. He taught me the ways, after he knew he wouldn't be able to stop me from traveling. A dwarf is short and stout, you don't scramble up the tree like a kn--er, an elf." (winks at Jaan, who laughs) "You have to use superior leverage. Ropes. Counterweights."
GM: "Alright. You're able to find a mighty pine, not the tallest tree you've ever seen but certainly the tallest for miles around. Mark off your use of adventuring gear, then give me a Defy Danger with Strength--like you said, you've only been taught in theory."
Kara: (rolls: 9) "Alright. What's the damage?"
GM: "The tree is bigger than you thought--the rope you've got isn't enough to get you all the way up. This far off the ground, you feel a little dizzy--if you go the rest of the way with no rope, you'll definitely be feeling it for a few hours. Or you can try to survey what you can from where you're at, but you won't have the full picture."
Kara: "Damn. Alright, I go the whole way. Dad wouldn't approve of breaking tradition, but he'd approve even less of leaving a job half-done."
GM: "Alright. You're going to feel Sick, -1 CON, until you get a good night's sleep. From the treetops, you can see that there's more than meets the eye about this mountain, because...."
And from there, new things are learned. Most likely, the party will Undertake a Perilous Journey to get to whatever's on the mountain, which will introduce all sorts of new things, and then there will be adventure on the mountain. Notice, the player created multiple things here (dwarven history, climbing techniques, personal connections), and yet all of it was in service to discovery. Filling in that blank on the map--which the GM likely did not have anything prepared for, originally--is part of the process of play, driven forward by player actions, but not simply one player narrating the full information about it. That's how Dungeon World works, like any PbtA game.
This sort of thing happens, where a non-adventuring activity turns into an adventure whether the PCs want it to or not, and that's fine unless it happens too often and becomes stale. But sometimes a non-adventuring activity is just that - you spend five boring days flying around over a blank-map area, after which the map ain't blank no more.
For the most part I agree with you and I honestly feel like this is a result of the assumption that the vast majority of D&D players are running through rigid pre-written adventure paths... which as I stated earlier, I don't believe is the default playstyle.
Speaking for myself, this is why I first stated that these conversations are like ships passing in the night.
It's why D&D is different. Not better, not worse, but different than most other RPGs.
Most other games are narrow in scope- this is why, for the most part, it is even possible to have such a complete diffusion of authority (absent the narrow focus, it is exceptionally hard to get a shared fiction going!). But D&D (however you wish to define it) doesn't work like that.
To make it more simple-
If you are playing BiTD (which seems to be the go-to example for certain people), then you're playing a heist game. With genre-appropriate bits (like flashbacks).
If you're playing D&D, you might be involved in a heist. Or a dungeon crawl. Or a post-apocalyptic jaunt. Or a horror story. Or some spy espionage against a neighboring kingdom. Or some courtly romance. Or high-level diplomacy. Or something comedic. Or leading vast armies in mass combat.
All of that is possible, and, for that matter, all of that is quite normal for many D&D players. The usual retort is, of course, "But D&D isn't good at X." Which is true .... D&D is not particularly good at a lot of things (other than, perhaps, being D&D). But for a multitude of reasons- the history of the different editions, the history of modifying the game (going back to OD&D), the wealth of 3PP, the culture of table rules and homebrews ... D&D is spectacularly malleable.
...not just spectacularly malleable ... but exists as a product and within a culture that is calling for it to be modified to the extent that the core rules themselves are full of optional rules and variant rules.
Which goes back to why these conversations aren't fruitful. If you are the type of person who strongly believes that a game must follow certain rules to be that game, the very nature of D&D is likely to lead not just to your frustration, but also the frustration of those conversing with you. IMO, YMMV, etc.
I don't buy it. You could say the same stuff about Runequest, or any number of games. That doesn't mean that RQ2, RQG and Mythras are all the same game.
I also find these conversations frustrating. I'm trying to say 'please actually read the rules for these games, and you will see they are not the same thing', and I get responses that make it sound like I'm trying to be the Chief of D&D Club Membership. I ask people to explain what they think D&D actually is, in a positive sense, and no-one can explain, except to say that it's unique and ineffable and I will never find a satisfying answer. I'm not asking about the nature of the Trinity, for goodness' sake.
This is why I think your description, 'product within a culture', is probably the closest we'll get. D&D isn't a game, it's an idea. Which is fine, until you want to talk about the specifics of a game, and they get confused with the idea.
You specifically may not, it's the impression I get from other posters at times. If it wasn't clear, I was only addressing one specific detail on this thread. The idea that we have to have rules to constrain the DM. I disagree, even if you want a more collaborative campaign than I run all the DM has to discuss it with the group and work out the best way to make that happen.
There's going to be limits with the structure of D&D of course based just on the flow of the game, but there's plenty of ways you can make D&D more collaborative if that's what the group wants.
Are they models of how the game is suppose to be played? I know a lot of DMs use them like that, but there are restrictions and limitations on what you can do with a module. It's certainly one way. But then when they try to more of a sandbox style campaign, people complain about that as well.
I'm not claiming that they are universal models, just that they act as models for many people. You say as much in your second sentence here... a lot of DMs use them like that.
That they're not the only model or the only way to play doesn't make them not influential.
