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

[zakael19]

Let’s not reframe the issue. The core fact remains: without you as the referee, the campaign doesn’t happen.

It doesn’t matter what authority the rules distribute or limit, if you dislike the direction the players want to take, you can always walk away. Whether it’s “stakeless shopping expeditions” or any other type of play you don’t enjoy, the result is the same: the campaign ends. That’s a form of power no rules text can override.

Sure ok, we're back to teh same silly argument about why you'd want to curtail GM power but somehow Uno reversed. "Well the players can just get up and walk away from bad GMing" and "the GM can just flip the table and leave if it's boring" are both facile arguments, and you're completely ignoring my discussion of what the game is putting limits on to get there.

I've said many times it's very clear that narrativist games give near-complete power to the GM over many aspects of play, I dont think anybody has contested that. Now, it does expect me to follow the rules of the game as contained within the Agenda/Principles/Gm and Player Moves, etc; but as V. Baker has said many times if people are going to ignore the rules you can't design for that - you design for the people under the bell curve who a) follow the rules to a greater or lesser extent and b) get enjoyment/engagement out of what you're doing.

We can compare the styles, but ultimately, it leads to the same conclusion: different types of leadership apply in different contexts. Games, especially campaigns meant to be fun, social, and cooperative, still require leadership. Just not the top-down kind.

Ok, sure, semantics. You're using a word in a definition that's not particularly common and somewhat contested where I may use another (facilitation or guidance probably).

 

[Lanefan]

No, not at all. It's not something I disagree with. It should be applied to every game, I'd say. I just can't support the "highs are nothing without lows" argument that's been made in this thread and many others. It's an argument for boring play.

Depends on one's threshold for boredom, I suppose.

If the "lows" are still interesting enough then you can still have a range of lows and highs. Same as a hockey game - they're going to play three 20-minute periods no matter what; a true fan will watch the whole game including its lows, highs, and everything else while a casual observer who only cares about the highs might only check out the highlight reel on the 11 o'clock sportscast.

Sometimes it seems like some of the games being promoted here want nothing but highs, and in so doing reduce themselves to being that 11 o'clock sportscast that skips over everything that led to those highs occurring in the first place.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think it was about 500ish pages ago I noted that as of 5.2024 the DMG once again has advice about skipping to interesting stuff / doing scene framing like movies / letting time pass in montages / etc.

Yeah, I remember reading that. I haven’t picked up any of the 2024 books yet, but I’ve been glad to hear some of the tidbits people have shared about the DMG.

 

[zakael19]

Depends on one's threshold for boredom, I suppose.

If the "lows" are still interesting enough then you can still have a range of lows and highs. Same as a hockey game - they're going to play three 20-minute periods no matter what; a true fan will watch the whole game including its lows, highs, and everything else while a casual observer who only cares about the highs might only check out the highlight reel on the 11 o'clock sportscast.

Sometimes it seems like some of the games being promoted here want nothing but highs, and in so doing reduce themselves to being that 11 o'clock sportscast that skips over everything that led to those highs occurring in the first place.

Sure, there's an ebb and flow to gameplay. Nobody can keep the tension ratcheted for 3 hours straight without getting exhausted IMO! In fact after a couple of sessions of nearly nothing but high stakes gameplay and revelations the players in my Tuesday game were saying they were ready for a break from the action.

But in this case what the break looks like is intimate, emotional, occasionally hilarious (my god the painfully awkward flirting between the aloof and reserved Anabelle and the princess), still super compelling (for all of us at the table) play. Those slower in terms of action but no less gasps of surprise and astonishment moments are the sort of downtime I look for now. I think it's neat that we can have games and tables set up so that even within the rulesets we don't have to settle for much in the way of lulls in the fictional engagement.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Thanks for the clarification, but I think this cuts to the heart of the issue.

You're saying that you're fine with players doing what they want, until it stops being interesting for you. At that point, you intervene to move things along, skip ahead, or ask players to clarify what they’re “trying for.”

But at that point, it’s not really player-driven play anymore, is it?

It’s play filtered through your lens of what counts as meaningful, engaging, or worthy of spotlight time. That may not feel like “authorial control”, but you're still controlling focus, tone, and pacing based on your standards.

Isn’t that exactly the sort of referee authority you’ve criticized in traditional games?

In my living world sandbox campaigns, players can dicker with a shopkeeper, wander without a plan, or talk to their ghost-sword for as long as they want, not because I think all of it is thrilling, but because I trust that meaning and engagement will emerge from what they care about, not from what I impose.

And if engagement only counts when it passes your threshold for stakes, then the game isn’t shaped by player choice, it’s shaped by your editorial judgment.

So if you're shutting scenes down when they don’t meet that threshold, how is that any different?

I never said that the GM shouldn’t have authority. And you’re also ignoring my comments that it’s about the group and you’re trying to frame it as if it’s solely about my interests.

Neither is the case.

I want the GM to be able to move things forward. To frame scenes and to call an end to them when needed.

That doesn’t mean play isn’t player focused. Especially when we all know what the focus of play will be.

Depends on one's threshold for boredom, I suppose.

If the "lows" are still interesting enough then you can still have a range of lows and highs. Same as a hockey game - they're going to play three 20-minute periods no matter what; a true fan will watch the whole game including its lows, highs, and everything else while a casual observer who only cares about the highs might only check out the highlight reel on the 11 o'clock sportscast.

Sometimes it seems like some of the games being promoted here want nothing but highs, and in so doing reduce themselves to being that 11 o'clock sportscast that skips over everything that led to those highs occurring in the first place.

It has nothing to do with being a “true fan”. I play pretty often, but that doesn’t mean my play time is unlimited. I like to get stuff done when we play. And as I think is clear by now, we're likely focused on very different things when we play.

But to run with your analogy… I want the entire game to be worthy of making highlights. At least, that’s what I’m shooting for.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Then there's no way to know either way, which means nothing objective can be said about it.

I can say with what feels like pretty fair certainty that the number of people who are particularly fond of high chances of failure is not large. How severe that reaction is depends on what that failure means, though, so yes, its hard to extend much beyond that.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

So, I don't think everyone wants to play 1000 Arrows all the time (IME a game with a relentless pace built in). OTOH could a slow paced BW game that, say, focused on some kind of elaborate Machiavellian milieu, satisfy a lot of desire for slower paced deliberate play be satisfying to many in the other direction while also being Narrativist in play style? Why not? Trad has no monopoly on any of this and attempts to argue it is the only way to get certain play are mostly not super convincing.

So this is a bit of a sidebar, but I'm not entirely sure that our 1KA game was representative. Our Stonetop game also had a relentless pace, and I think we're bringing a significant part of that to bear in our action declarations for our characters. Manbearcat and I talked once about playing with the pedal down and our preference for that style of play in relation to that game, and I saw a lot of that in the 1KA game, too (e.g., Yorath's petitioning of Helior to save his bacon or Suetsuna kidnapping little Yoshimoto to bring him off to be baptized both feel conherent and consistent as aesthetic choices). But I don't think we have to play these games that way. I think we could play 1KA more deliberately without sacrificing tension or turtling up. And I know we could play Stonetop more deliberately: we didn't spend a lot of time with some of the quieter tech in that game.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Gotcha, that makes sense from your perspective. Since I don't play games to imitate the banality of life, but instead take advantage of the techniques of scene framing / spotlighting / montages / etc to focus in on what we all share an interest and excitement in, I can see our disconnect in preference here.

You've also noted that you find designing / worldbuilding often more rewarding and enjoyable then playing right?

Yes, I absolutely do. Worldbuilding and figuring out mechanics for fictional processes is my jam. I have pretty much zero positive interest in any of the techniques you described.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The disconnect is what @Thomas Shey pointed out earlier; if a player is expecting consequences to follow as a reflection of the quality of their decision making and that's instead handed over to a dice result, no amount of enthusiasm for "finding out" is going to fix the situation.

I also want to emphasize something I referenced in passing but didn't go into in any great detail: the fact those consequences are directly triggered by those die rolls makes the situation even worse. Some people will argue up and down that it shouldn't make a difference, but it very clearly does trigger the "my character is incompetent" reaction in a pretty fair number of people, and arguing it shouldn't is a compete waste of time.

(This is a general problem with most systems with purely or primarily player-facing mechanics; it can easily come across as everything going wrong being the player's fault whether it is presented that way or not.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not just mine, but also the other folks at the table. And it's not about dramatic weight... stop trying to shoehorn the drama angle into things. It's about play that is interesting and has stakes.

Have we not all had someone who wants to speak in character to the innkeeper or some other NPC at length in a rather aimless way while everyone else is just watching, waiting for something to happen?



No, not really. Generally, my players aren't going to aimlessly wander in most games. It becomes more of an issue in more trad-leaning games because the instinct fostered by traditional thinking is to follow the characters at length and to never skip over any time at all. I don't like that approach to play, even when I'm playing something more trad-leaning. I'm going to skip ahead at times. I'm going to say "okay let's move things along". I'm going to ask "what is it you're trying for here" to bring things to a point.

What I'm not going to do is let a player be self-indulgent to the point that play is tedious for anyone else.

You often describe the role of the GM as one involving leadership... and though I generally don't agree, based on your take, I wouldn't think this would be that strange to you. A GM should be facilitating play. To me, part of that is to make sure that things remain interesting.

One of the way I think is best to address this kind of thing... because the spotlight will rotate at times... is to keep whatever is happening for one or two characters to be interesting to all the players, including the GM. That usually means some kind of stakes or importance.

Watching another player dicker with an NPC shopkeeper about prices makes me want to smash my head into the table. Watching another player speak to the ghost of his ancestor that lives in his sword and who has ideas about the characters actions? That's something I want to watch.



Yes, I know this. But how do you reconcile this with your earlier point that your job is not just to make the players happy. What if they're doing something that isn't satisfying to you in some way? Or maybe two players are into it, but two or three others are not?

I've never really had this issue. If and when it comes up I'll let you know.