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

[SableWyvern]

Why would "nothing happens" be the only or uniquely good narration that is possible?

What some of us find implausible (not impossible) is that something interesting happens every time you roll the dice. We can also find it jarring that the interesting thing doesn't necessarily seem connected to the event that triggered the die roll. Sometimes "nothing much happens or changes" feels like the most likely thing, and if that not only doesn't happen this time, but never happens, that can start to stretch credulity.

You may not find it so implausible, and that's OK too.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I answered that. There could always be a ticking clock, the friend dies if you don't get there in time. But the cause of the death is still not the failed roll, it's the clock running out of time.

I rarely use ticking clocks with that level of precision and you could always create a ticking clock after the fact. But if I know that the clock was invented as cover for what was going to happen because I failed a roll I will enjoy the game less.

That’s all fine. My point is not that anyone has to like this approach… it was that your characterization of it was inaccurate. There’s no reason that a fail forward approach must include things that don’t
make sense.

EDITED TO ADD: the key word “don’t” in the final sentence!

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't see it as necessarily being poor design, though.

When I design a dungeon-type adventure, unless I'm intentionally designing something more gonzo or "funhouse", I try to put myself in the shoes of whoever first built the place and think "What makes (or made, at the time) the most sense design-wise for the intended purpose of this complex?". And if, while standing in those shoes, I want there to be a hidden area within what I'm building then I'm going to make sure there's only one way in to that area and also make sure that said way in is as hard to find as I can manage, for someone who doesn't already know where it is.

From there, I think about what subsequent occupants (if any) there might have been and what they might have done to the place in terms of renovations, additions, destruction, and so forth; eventually leading up to the complex the PCs actually find and explore.

And so yes, in this design there's a chokepoint (a well-hidden and hard-to-open single entrance to a whole new area) and the very real risk of things being missed. Poor GAME design? Maybe, but I don't care much about that; I'm far more interested in designing something that makes in-fiction sense (i.e. what to me is good design), and it's on the explorers to make sure they take the time to gather information, explore everything, and still be prepared to miss bits of it.

Yes yes you’re extrapolating. And in the many years since the place was built, with the many subsequent inhabitants that you’ve decided have lived there, you can have them do anything at all.

So yeah… choosing to have a chokepoint like that is poor design, no matter what fiction you use to justify it. Again, these are GM decisions.

What you’re saying is that your sense of the place, whatever it may be, is more important than gameplay. And that’s fine, assuming everyone at the table is on board with it. But as general advice? I would tell people not to make such decisions.

 

[pemerton]

What some of us find implausible (not impossible) is that something interesting happens every time you roll the dice.

Wouldn't this depend, at least in part, on the rule that tells you when to roll the dice?

 

[pemerton]

I just found this on DnDBeyond:

The Social Contract of Adventures
You must provide reasonably appealing reasons for characters to undertake the adventures you prepare. In exchange, the players should go along with those hooks. It’s OK for your players to give you some pushback on why their characters should want to do what you’re asking them to do, but it’s not OK for them to invalidate the hard work you’ve done preparing the adventure by willfully going in a different direction.​

At least for some crucial action declarations, therefore, the current version of D&D is advocating author stance, not actor stance. Which is consistent with my conjecture upthread that this is pretty common in mainstream D&D play.

 

[zakael19]

The GM's principal goal, in presenting situations and narrating consequences, is not to reveal a world or setting or environment to the players. It is, rather, to present risks, threats, opportunities etc that will prompt the players to declare actions for their PCs based on their sense of what their PCs want and feel and hope for when confronted by these risks, threats, opportunities etc.

And the principal goal of a player in AW is not to (i) learn details of the GM' setting so that (ii) they can explore it, or manipulate it, so as to achieve some goal - often wealth and status - for their PC. The player's goal is to be their character, who has personal and often rather intimate hopes and concerns that the circumstances of the apocalypse - both material and social - place under pressure

Not that PBTA design precludes this. We do an awful lot of setting discovery in Stonetop, it's a core component of the Agenda and Principles ("Portray and Rich and Mysterious World" / "Exploit the Setting Guide") and an XP trigger (the one that's designed to be an end-of-session reflection on "what did we learn about the world and its history today?" and hit nearly every time).

But the second point remains - we explore the setting because to do so is immediately important to the goals of what the characters desire to learn, and the hopes and concerns they want to see out of The World's End / their lives in the town of Stonetop. Does this mean that I as the GM also point towards areas of exploration that I'm curious about and want to see on the table? Of course, we share responsibility for highlighting where play goes. Plus you know, I want to give them space to hit their XP markers.

I think Stonetop is somewhat emblematic of the work you need to do to the core PBTA, AW descended design philosophy to get to an "explore the world" sort of place; and even there it's not "rootless adventurers" (although Freebooters on the Frontier does exist for that, and does the "chasing adventure for gold" while re-contextualizing GM and Player authorities far more to the GM side then most PBTAs). You do expeditions into the world because your relationships and the town you value requires it, and then you return home to let things breathe and be reminded of your obligations.

...we somehow just ticked over 40 sessions into my Monday Stonetop game, and it feels like we're barely scratching the surface of play so far.

 

[SableWyvern]

Wouldn't this depend, at least in part, on the rule that tells you when to roll the dice?

Potentially, yes. There are many things it might depend on. That fact that someone who is unhappy with the effect at a certain rate of dice rolling may, potentially, not find it as bad at a different rate of dice rolling, has nothing much to do with the point I was making, however, which is that some people find it implausible.

It doesn't matter how many people, in total, find it implausible, or what proportion of those people might find it less implausible under a specific set of circumstances. The relevant point is that some people in this thread, generally, find it implausible.

 

[zakael19]

What some of us find implausible (not impossible) is that something interesting happens every time you roll the dice. We can also find it jarring that the interesting thing doesn't necessarily seem connected to the event that triggered the die roll. Sometimes "nothing much happens or changes" feels like the most likely thing, and if that not only doesn't happen this time, but never happens, that can start to stretch credulity.

You may not find it so implausible, and that's OK too.

Let's recast this a bit: when I run Stonetop, we roll the dice because we are doing something interesting, there's an obstacle of some sort or the rules demand it, and we want to see if our goals are going to be achieved. The triggers by which the rules of the game say to roll the dice are generally gated behind the player saying interesting fiction, in response to the GM saying interesting fiction, to get to an interesting outcome.

Eg: if the characters are asking an NPC to do something, and there's no reason I can think of for said NPC to resist, there's no Persuade roll. If there is, I say so and if they press forward, we see what happens. If they're delving into an ancient barrow, recently looted by tomb robbers spilling forth undead into the plains nearby their town - and they say they're searching the dead bodies in the first room to see what killed them, we confirm that they're Seek[ing] Insight and they roll.

But it's pretty rare for the players to spend a bunch of time declaring things that are, by the rules and focus of the game, uninteresting enough to not trigger a dice-rolling mechanic. Thus, every time we roll the dice we are discovering the outcome of an interesting conflict. Or at least I hope so, otherwise I'm not being a good GM and "Make[ing] their lives interesting."

 

[SableWyvern]

Let's recast this a bit: when I run Stonetop, we roll the dice because we are doing something interesting, there's an obstacle of some sort or the rules demand it, and we want to see if our goals are going to be achieved. The triggers by which the rules of the game say to roll the dice are generally gated behind the player saying interesting fiction, in response to the GM saying interesting fiction, to get to an interesting outcome.

Eg: if the characters are asking an NPC to do something, and there's no reason I can think of for said NPC to resist, there's no Persuade roll. If there is, I say so and if they press forward, we see what happens. If they're delving into an ancient barrow, recently looted by tomb robbers spilling forth undead into the plains nearby their town - and they say they're searching the dead bodies in the first room to see what killed them, we confirm that they're Seek[ing] Insight and they roll.

But it's pretty rare for the players to spend a bunch of time declaring things that are, by the rules and focus of the game, uninteresting enough to not trigger a dice-rolling mechanic. Thus, every time we roll the dice we are discovering the outcome of an interesting conflict. Or at least I hope so, otherwise I'm not being a good GM and "Make[ing] their lives interesting."

I understand your example, but I am unclear what point you are trying to make with it.

I keep saying that some people don't like the way certain mechanics make them feel about the way the game world works. I also keep saying that I understand that plenty of people don't have that problem with those mechanics, and if it works for them, that's great.

At least three different people have responded with what seem like attempts to prove that the people who enjoy the mechanic are correct for liking it. I have never suggested that it's not OK to like the mechanic, nor is it necessary to prove that it works for them. This all being the case, and the fact that these comments seem to be phrased as rebuttals, makes it feel as if they're an attempt to suggest people who don't like the mechanic are wrong for not liking it. [And, to be clear, it's not even that I dislike the mechanic; for me, it has it's place, and I'm happy to use it in certain types of games. Those game just happen to not be the ones I tend to like and run the most, and I enjoy them more as an occasional change of pace.]

 

[Maxperson]

Skipping past those things doesn’t mean they don’t “happen”, either. It just means we don’t focus on them during table time.



I don’t see how this makes any sense. Let’s say you run a game and spend time on those bits… the haggling and the travel and so on… and I run the same game, but we elide those bits.

The same events have happened for both groups of PCs. There’s no case of “more coincidence” for one over the other.

Where more interesting things are happening is at the table, not in the game world.

You don't, because you can't. Oh, you can skip past walking somewhere, but you can't go off into the trees to look for herbs the way we can, because you didn't show up at the next place with herbs you got during the trip, or maybe failed to get. Same with haggling and many other details.

You'd have to literally have your PCs taking every possible option at every available instant in order to be skipping past what we do. Clearly you don't do that, so what you do is just do the interesting parts and pretend you did stuff during that "skipped" time if you decide you need to say have herbs. But you still won't have done all the things that PCs do with traditional D&D. The same events will not have happened.