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

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, but the rules don't have to explicitly encourage it. That's a design choice.

Sometimes they have to as a price of the abstraction. As in, to represent a non-metagame element, you still need to think in metagame terms because the mechanics are, after all, metagame. You can argue that's less than idea, but there's limited tools available no matter who designed a system and for what purposes.

 

[pemerton]

No it doesn’t. If they occurred on A’s turn then they occurred before anything that happened on B’s turn.

OK, so you adopt the stop-motion interpretation of the fiction. Upthread I conjectured that no one does this, but it turns out I was wrong!

 

[Thomas Shey]

So, with my 4 free hours of game time available per month, I have invested in this character, and rolling a 1 trying to scale the cliff causes her to die, because other people in the real world have done so.
You would seriously rule it that way? Because if so, what a bloody waste of time it's been investing in that character.

I'm not going to speak for Micah, but I will note there are games that explicitly have falls as the consequence of fumbles. They may or may not give you an opportunity to try and recover, but without belaying ropes, free climbing in those systems at high heights can indeed lead to death.

As I referenced, I think these days that's not serving either simulation (because the probabilities are too high) or other purposes, but its absolutely a thing.

 

[pemerton]

I think there is a clear difference between this minor sort of concession to playability and modifying actions which took place hours or days before.

The difference isn't very clear to me.

 

[FrogReaver]

OK, so you adopt the stop-motion interpretation of the fiction. Upthread I conjectured that no one does this, but it turns out I was wrong!

I think stop motion is the valid critique here and that your 6 seconds in the past rewinds per turn doesn’t hold up to any kind of actual scrutiny. (See the death critique).

But I think there’s a third option.

Players can actively avoid declaring any actions or making any interpretations of the fiction that would contradict the forward facing causality. This limits their tactical space in order to preserve forward facing causality - which is what we actually observe at tables.

For example, no one 30ft from an orc ever declares I run to meet the orc in the middle of the battlefield because they know they can close the distance and attack if first or they know the orc will do the same if he’s first. Since that action is never declared we don’t have to worry about how it fits causally into the fiction.

 

[FrogReaver]

The difference isn't very clear to me.

Presumably it’s a concession for G over S in this particular instance if I understand basic forge speak

 

[Faolyn]

This is well stated and true, to some extent. But I think there is a difference between the GM saying the bar has a barmaid because they are trying to describe the world and because they are specifically generating a complication.

If an aspect of the world can frustrate the players plans, then it is better to be fixed beforehand, because then the players can do more to plan around it. Their choices become more meaningful.

The barmaid probably is not subject to many interesting choices, so it isn't as big a deal to improvise.

I had a player in a game once who decided, out of the blue, that they were going to offer every goblinoid they saw a job. A legitimate job, with pay. I think they were even working on a union when the game folded. You never know what the players are going to do. And because you never know what players are going to do, you also can't easily plan for it.

I honestly don't see much of a difference between the barmaid and the cook, beyond the fact that the players are somewhat more likely to try to hurt the cook. They're both someone who'll be on screen for a few moments at most, unless the players make an effort to bring them in more often than that.

 

[pemerton]

D&D occasionally uses morale/passion-type modifiers.

In the original MM, some creatures - dragons, su-monsters - get combat bonuses when defending their young. And berserkers get general combat bonuses due to their "battle lust".

Since 3E, barbarians have received combat bonuses when raging, although in more recent iterations this has been reframed as primal magic rather than raw passion.

It is possible to generalise this idea. Prince Valiant provides an example (from p 23 of the rulebook, under the general heading "Modifiers"):

MORALE
Psychological factors such as love, hatred, faith, loyalty, hope, and even sheer desperation are important in real life. Such factors are reflected by morale modifiers in Prince Valiant, the Storytelling Game. The modifiers may be both positive and negative.

Morale can affect both Brawn and Presence. Apply a modifier of 1 when the emotion or passion is strong in intensity. Apply a modifier of 2 for extremely powerful psychological factors.

The players will enjoy the game more if their acting is rewarded with an occasional positive modifier based on morale factors. The Storyteller must use common sense and his instinct for drama to determine the morale modifier for a particular situation.

For the purposes of storytelling, cowards, liars, and villains should often receive negative morale modifiers, representing guilty terror, apprehensiveness, and general confusion. Heroic characters should sometimes receive positive morale modifiers to represent love, confidence and faith, or other grand emotions.

See the examples of combat below for several situations where love inspires Prince Valiant, giving him a positive modifier for morale.​

The extent to which these sorts of modifiers are applied will obviously affect the tone of the play experience.

 

[zakael19]

I had a player in a game once who decided, out of the blue, that they were going to offer every goblinoid they saw a job. A legitimate job, with pay. I think they were even working on a union when the game folded. You never know what the players are going to do. And because you never know what players are going to do, you also can't easily plan for it.

I honestly don't see much of a difference between the barmaid and the cook, beyond the fact that the players are somewhat more likely to try to hurt the cook. They're both someone who'll be on screen for a few moments at most, unless the players make an effort to bring them in more often than that.

Oh, my players absolutely took this route to convincing the bugbears (or was it the Hobgoblins?) in Lost Mines that they should stop working for the evil wizard guy. "Do you guys even get dental and medical benefits? Have you heard of a union?" We were playing in Eberron so they wound up starting a miners union down there and forcing the Brelish government to bargain.

There was a lot of references to Marl Karx and playing of the Soviet anthem that campaign. Good times.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

D&D occasionally uses morale/passion-type modifiers.

In the original MM, some creatures - dragons, su-monsters - get combat bonuses when defending their young. And berserkers get general combat bonuses due to their "battle lust".

Since 3E, barbarians have received combat bonuses when raging, although in more recent iterations this has been reframed as primal magic rather than raw passion.

It is possible to generalise this idea. Prince Valiant provides an example (from p 23 of the rulebook, under the general heading "Modifiers"):

MORALE​

Psychological factors such as love, hatred, faith, loyalty, hope, and even sheer desperation are important in real life. Such factors are reflected by morale modifiers in Prince Valiant, the Storytelling Game. The modifiers may be both positive and negative.​

​

Morale can affect both Brawn and Presence. Apply a modifier of 1 when the emotion or passion is strong in intensity. Apply a modifier of 2 for extremely powerful psychological factors.​

​

The players will enjoy the game more if their acting is rewarded with an occasional positive modifier based on morale factors. The Storyteller must use common sense and his instinct for drama to determine the morale modifier for a particular situation.​

​

For the purposes of storytelling, cowards, liars, and villains should often receive negative morale modifiers, representing guilty terror, apprehensiveness, and general confusion. Heroic characters should sometimes receive positive morale modifiers to represent love, confidence and faith, or other grand emotions.​

​

See the examples of combat below for several situations where love inspires Prince Valiant, giving him a positive modifier for morale.​

The extent to which these sorts of modifiers are applied will obviously affect the tone of the play experience.

Just wanted to note that this is an example of something I consider to be perfectly legitimate use of "common sense" and "[GM's] instinct"--not because it's about drama, but because there are guidelines. The rules specify the context and appropriate ranges; the GM is expected to use these judiciously, because the books can't do that part. They can furnish you with the tools to make those decisions easier, and to ensure that the impact of those decisions is worthwhile to the players. But they can't actually make the decision on your behalf, and do not try to do so.

I, as a player, can see and know the same rules and limits, the same structure, that the GM does. That means I actually have the ability to understand what processes are involved, what kinds of choices are being made in a given context. That means I can decide for myself whether the GM's judgment is judicious or not, whether or not their common sense is in fact common between us and actually sensible. I'm not dependent on trying to read someone's mind when they're making decisions inside the black box that they won't describe to me (and that I would not want them to describe to me in that context, to be clear!)

This is strongly related to my...intense...negative reaction to the suggestion that players should have all of the rules hidden away from them, so that they are wholly dependent on the GM telling them what they can or cannot do, what is or is not possible, etc., etc., without any means, whatsoever, of knowing what is happening within the rules. I find that particular concept...let's just say "off-putting" would be the understatement of the decade.

Players knowing the frameworks in which decisions are made, understanding where the boundaries lie, is quite important. Hence why I have a rather dim view of the idea (I don't think Gygax said this one?) that you should forbid players from playing in your game if they've read the DMG.