Players: it's your responsibility to carry a story.

[S'mon]

D&D has no rules for romance.

...By the same token, if you take D&D and start spinning off romantic subplots, you are really using a totally different game (of your own making, based on your judgment) and no longer playing D&D

I'm not criticizing anyone who chooses to do that. I think it is actually great. I just dont think it is D&D anymore.

Strongly, strongly disagree with that. The roots of D&D are in what used to be called "romantic fantasy", what we now call Fantasy was once called Romance, and centred around knights questing for their lady loves, encountering dragons and magical wonders.

But semantics aside, love & romance subplots and even (horrors!) plots fit perfectly into a "high adventure" game of swords and magic. The popularity of The Princess Bride as a model ought to tell you something.

Now, it's true that the older monster-&-gold based XP system does not provide a great reward mechanic - it doesn't provide a great reward mechanic for rescuing prisoners or commanding armies either, but it's pretty easy to modify. 3e's Challenge-based system provides somewhat more support (plus 3e DMG gives freeform XP as an option), and 4e's XP for Major & Minor Quests, and DMG2 suggested XP-for-roleplay, provide more support again, in fact all the support you need, since the player can decide what their quests are and the DM can rate it minor or major and assign a Level, defaulting to PC level.

But of course we're still talking the high-adventure romantic fantasy here, not Jane Austen. PCs are expected to climb vine-wrapped towers, battle giants, duel with dragons - but in pursuit of romantic goals rather than ruins' gold.

 

[S'mon]

That should teach me to not post with a 2 week old baby in my lap. Short circuits the brain a bit.. whoops.

Hmm... ~S'mon looks over at now 3-year-old-critter watching Tom & Jerry ~... agree strongly!

 

[S'mon]

t a solution to this might consist in an individual GM and his/her players agreeing in advance about some aspects of the game like theme, tropes, relationships embedding the PCs into the gameworld, etc...

S'mon... ...are saying that the OP's issue can be resolved in the course of play, by having active players engage the gameworld to find out what is going on in terms of theme, tropes, possible relationships etc.

Well, I think it may well be worth establishing in advance that the PCS are adventurers in a world of monsters and magic, and are thus expected to proactively seek adventure. When I started with fantasy gaming around 1983-1984, it still told me this on the back (or front) of all the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and later RPG products I purchased.

Now, the adventure might well start at the entrance to the dungeon, as in most gamebooks and the advice in eg Moldvay Basic D&D. But in the latter case this was understood as a learning tool, and what the PCs then did was left up to them, with the understanding that the PCs were adventurers! Obviously the sane individual would then take a look at the Black Pit, turn around and go back to the village - that's how my wife plays Call of Cthulu, drives me nuts! - but the PCs are not sane, they're adventurers!


I do think that the shift in published adventures to very linear play resulted in a shift in player expectations towards "wait for the railroad". And published 4e WoTC modules are the absolute nadir of this, many are just a linear series of fights. If you think the DM will freak out if you do something unexpected, then you learn to be passive and wait for the rails to appear. 4e's encounter-based design can be very bad this way, if the DM has put a lot of work into encounters he may want to ensure they're all used, and WoTC module writers certainly seem to think that way.

Anyway, yes, there is a social contract issue. If you're running a "sandbox" game, tell the players and ensure they're aware of their responsibility to be proactive and seek adventures of their choice. If you're running an Adventure Path, make sure the players know that and that they have the responsibility to engage with the adventures on the Path (of course they can request a deviation or even negotiate an abandonment of the Path, if it sucks).

 

[pemerton]

All your examples - "Dragonlance, Immortals rules, Ravenloft, Birthright" are "high adventure" games/campaigns/settings. Is this just a semantic quibble?

I think Hussar is agreeing with me that, when it comes to the goals of fantasy RPG play, Dragonlance is different from Conan. Yes, they're all high adventure. But they set up pretty different expectations about how the players should be engaging the gameworld via their PCs.

(This isn't to insist that Hussar and I are right about this perceived difference. Just to try to clarify what I think is going on - ie that it is a genuine difference of perception and not just a semantic quibble.)

 

[S'mon]

I think Hussar is agreeing with me that, when it comes to the goals of fantasy RPG play, Dragonlance is different from Conan. Yes, they're all high adventure. But they set up pretty different expectations about how the players should be engaging the gameworld via their PCs.

Yes, as I wrote just above:

"Anyway, yes, there is a social contract issue. If you're running a "sandbox" game, tell the players and ensure they're aware of their responsibility to be proactive and seek adventures of their choice. If you're running an Adventure Path, make sure the players know that and that they have the responsibility to engage with the adventures on the Path (of course they can request a deviation or even negotiate an abandonment of the Path, if it sucks)."

 

[pemerton]

I do think that the shift in published adventures to very linear play resulted in a shift in player expectations towards "wait for the railroad". And published 4e WoTC modules are the absolute nadir of this, many are just a linear series of fights.

<snip>

4e's encounter-based design can be very bad this way, if the DM has put a lot of work into encounters he may want to ensure they're all used, and WoTC module writers certainly seem to think that way.

I agree about the overarching plots of the 4e modules being the pits.

I'm also one of those who thinks that 4e is not ideal for sandboxing because of the amount of preparation that its encounters (both combat and skill challenge) tend to rely upon to really shine. (Having said that, I know some people run 4e as a sandbox, and LostSoul has done some substantive rewriting of the rules to support this.)

What is frustrating, to me, about WotC's presentation of 4e is that they don't take what seems to be the obvious third alternative to railroad and sandbox, namely, encouraging the sort of PC creation that Nameless1 has talked about, and then encouraging the GM to build encounters around that. No railroad, because the GM's work is a response to the hooks that the players have put into the game at character build; but a tighter framework for GM preparation than a sandbox tends to provide.

It's doubly frustrating because 4e has so many elements that support this approach, such as Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies, Warlock pacts, a pantheon whose mythic role and history is heavily integrated into the published gameworld from the ground up, an attempt at a coherent presentation of the many D&D monsters within that same mythic history, etc.
Maybe it's not quite Glorantha, but we're looking at a pretty different package compared to AD&D or Basic. It's not as if the GM and players are going to have to put a thematically driven game together from scratch.

And to take this out of theory and into published game rules: where is the much-vaunted and promised guidance for Destiny Quests? These seem to me to only really make sense on the thematic approach to play - the GM prepares and runs a quest based on the players' hooks chosen at the metagame level - and WotC has given no guidance at all on how to build them or run them.

 

[S'mon]

I'm also one of those who thinks that 4e is not ideal for sandboxing because of the amount of preparation that its encounters (both combat and skill challenge) tend to rely upon to really shine. (Having said that, I know some people run 4e as a sandbox, and LostSoul has done some substantive rewriting of the rules to support this.)

My current 4e Vault of Larin Karr campaign is about 80% sandbox, depending on how strict you are with definition - I throw in some Dungeon Delves and such as single-session adventures, but they don't all get used, or are used in a different order than I envisaged. I've not seen any big problem with the RAW. I use Paizo terrain battlemats to create interesting ad hoc wilderness encounters.

The main difference from running 1e is that it pays much more to only have a small number of random/semi-random encounters prepped, say 1-3, rather than an extensive random encounter table with dozens. Sometimes I roll a few times on the random tables ahead of play, then prep those encounters in 4e format.

I find the skill challenge rules fairly useless and very rarely use them. Few events/obstacles are worth that amount of time and effort, especially since a big* 4e combat can suck up so much time already.

*Session before last involved a fight with 6 PCs and 1 allied NPC all of levels 3-5 vs 12 Orc Raiders, 2 Orc Berserkers, an Orc Shaman of Gruumsh, and a level 6 elite Ogre. That took a good long time.

 

[S'mon]

The main difference from running 1e is that it pays much more to only have a small number of random/semi-random encounters prepped, say 1-3, rather than an extensive random encounter table with dozens. Sometimes I roll a few times on the random tables ahead of play, then prep those encounters in 4e format.

Also, with 4e I make far more use of 'wandering' monsters as a pacing mechanic rather than a world-sim tool. If the PCs are heading for area X midway through a session, I decide whether I want them to get to area X right now, near the end of the session, or next week. Then I can have 0, 1, or 2 wandering-monster encounters on the way to X.

 

[Barastrondo]

Poor language use on my part. I shouldnt have said subplots. My apologies. We were talking about the whole game being consumed by romance, and that is not a subplot.

I was referring to when the game is dominated by these elements that you are really making your own game up at that point.

Yet even if the game is dominated by those elements thematically you still can't say for sure what actual gameplay is like until you see the game in play. Again, it's entirely possible that the game consists of a number of encounters, with combat and traps and puzzles, in a very straightforward classic sense — but the motivation is romance, and the PCs are fighting their way through a dungeon that is, say, a fey labyrinth. Romance is content, but it's also at heart a theme, not a plot or a ruleset.

The trouble I have with saying that romance even as a main plot changes the game is that, fairly applied, this also disqualifies several other high points that D&D has hit. Dark Sun is post-apocalyptic survival-themed D&D. Ravenloft is Gothic Horror-themed D&D. Planescape is metaphysical-themed D&D. Eberron is pulp action-themed D&D. I can't support any definition of D&D that disqualifies all of those, and I just don't see how romance is more of a gamebreaker than post-apocalyptic survival or pulp action. It's just such a ubiquitous concept to human existence.

 

[Fifth Element]

By the same token, if you take D&D and start spinning off romantic subplots, you are really using a totally different game (of your own making, based on your judgment) and no longer playing D&D.

I'm not criticizing anyone who chooses to do that. I think it is actually great. I just dont think it is D&D anymore.

That's a meaningless distinction, though, because there are all kinds of things that D&D has no rules for. They come up all the time, in pretty much every session I've ever played. There aren't any rules for roleplaying; so does too much roleplaying mean it's "not D&D" anymore? Are you only playing D&D when you're actually using the game rules - most of which apply only to combat?