D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[DinoInDisguise]

Because I play in and run such games and they’re just as verisimilitudinous as anything else.

“I can do what you do, but better — and without sacrificing what matters to me.”

Interesting way to frame a friendly discussion about play styles.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I do find what Lancer with its narrative expansion & ICON are doing fascinating attempts at having your cake and eating it too here. "Oh, here's your mega tactical grid-based combat, but also your free flowing fiction-first storytelling mode."

Ugh, I really want to get DH to the table though - so much promise to fuse both things together without separate game modes.

From what I saw reading Lancer, it'd probably make me profoundly uncomfortable how loosey-goosey it is once you step out of a mech, honestly. I agree its an interesting design choice, but not one for me, I think.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It is about your interests, your own words make that clear:

I already addressed this in this Prior Post.

You didn’t say one player, or an isolated moment. You described the entire table, players plural, doing what they wanted. And you made it clear that if their choices didn’t meet your threshold for stakes or pathos, you’d step in and redirect play.

That’s not a group decision. That’s a referee judgment call.

Maybe it’s a call grounded in experience, and maybe it often improves the session, but it’s still your decision to override what the players are doing in service of what you think the campaign should be. That’s not collaboration. That’s the use of the authority the rules give you.


And I agree: your campaigns, from everything you've described, are player-focused. The systems you favor support that well.

But that’s not the issue.

What I’m pointing out is that your critique of traditional play, and the authority its referees exercise, is hollow when you're doing the same thing under a different procedure. The only difference is how the system frames the referee's intervention, not whether it happens. You still have the authority to say “this isn’t working” and shift the focus based on your judgment.

That’s fine. But calling it player-focused when you override the players’ current choices is a distinction without a difference.

I think there’s a significant difference at play.

As you’ve described it, what your games are about is the material that you’ve prepared. Yeah, the players will select what they want to engage with… based on what’s available based on the events of play… and then based on what the players do, you extrapolate to make decisions about the outcome.

So you’re setting everything up, the players interact with some things as their characters, and then you determine what happens. You’ve described your desired experience for the players is that they feel like they visited another world. Your world.

The type of authority I’m talking about exercising is more about keeping play focused. You’re saying it’s all about what I want, but as I’ve already explained… and to be honest, as you should already know by this point… the players and I will have discussed the goals of play ahead of time, and then continually during play. So as a GM, I’m gonna always be pushing things toward those goals.

If something stalls out, if a player is unsure what to do and is therefore spinning their wheels, then I’m going to work to get things going again. I’m not making major decisions about the outcomes of play… I’m keeping it focused on what the group wants play to be focused on.

The characters remain the focus of play. The players’ input constantly matters. That I don’t roleplay out a shopping scene or every other interaction with an NPC doesn’t change that.

As I said in one of my prior comments to you, it’s not a matter of there being GM authority… it’s simply when and how it’s applied.

If you don’t see the difference, I don’t know what to tell you.

 

[zakael19]

From what I saw reading Lancer, it'd probably make me profoundly uncomfortable how loosey-goosey it is once you step out of a mech, honestly. I agree its an interesting design choice, but not one for me, I think.

The Trade Baronies expansion adds in what are functionally tweaked Blades in the Dark style playbooks to facilitate narrative play with more meat on the bones. ICON takes this a lot further up front, in that there's an entire FITD narrative play side that you could run on its own; and the tactical combat side (it's meant to be that only in tactical play can your characters actually die, very progression fantasy/shonen anime vibe feel); both with separate playbooks/classes. So your wise old-sage narrative side can actually be a totally kick-ass martial artist when you unveil your full power.

Some cool ideas there.

 

[zakael19]

“I can do what you do, but better — and without sacrificing what matters to me.”

Interesting way to frame a friendly discussion about play styles.

This thread has hundreds of posts of people implying that if you arent doing some sort of pure sim / traditional D&D / something else style of play, it just "won't have verisimilitude." I definitely accept that like for @Micah Sweet he wouldn't find Blades in the dark or whatever to feel "real" for his brain that wants heavier simulation to hit right; but there's a lot of phrasing that suggests that anything but "living world" or "non-scene paced D&D" or whatever is fundamentally incapable of this sort of thing.

So you get replies like @hawkeyefan 's or mine or others throughout this where we point out that for ourselves and others at our tables, we routinely get feedback or the impression that our games are among the most "in the world" feeling experienced.

 

[hawkeyefan]

“I can do what you do, but better — and without sacrificing what matters to me.”

Interesting way to frame a friendly discussion about play styles.

I don’t think that’s a very accurate interpretation of the exchange.

It started with this:

To me, a game that's all highlights makes no sense to me as a verisimilitudinous setting. And that's what I want.

That doesn’t sound to you like @Micah Sweet saying that what I’ve just described as my game makes no sense as a verisimilitudinous setting?

My comment was me defending what I described against his criticism.