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

[Micah Sweet]

So are you rolling for coronaries every time someone gets stressed? After all, that's happened to young athletes on occasion.

So I'm going to say that "does it happen" is not "always worth considering" and you're writing off some events as too unlikely to be worth factoring in.

There's that 100% realism strawman! Haven't seen him in a while.

Consideration does not equal action.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Do you think WotC had to in this case? If so, why haven't they done so with all their previous PHs?

 

[Micah Sweet]

The difference isn't very clear to me.

In your game there probably isn't one, so that makes sense.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't use random encounters.

I don't bother figuring out the CR for the adversaries I use (since I rarely run monsters straight out of the book) because it's annoying and I find the CR system to be inexact and un-useful. They're all over the place, power-wise, anyway.

My sandbox is a city. Which is on a mountain. The PCs base of operations is actually in the Undercity, which is one of the most physically dangerous parts of the city. They started there at 1st level.

I don't consider plains to be safer than swamps; especially since such places would be the natural habitat of large, flying predators (and you would have minimal cover from them), and they would have much wilder weather than a swamp typically would have.

And yet those low level PCs survive in this 'most dangerous' part of the city. Either the city just ain't that dangerous (for PCs at least) or there's something protecting them, plot armor? I mean, sure, you can be careful, but in a world full of super powerful high level magical beasts, danger is not something you can constantly avoid!

Anyway, I can't account for every single game in the world. I've probably played in 50 or 100 campaigns. I can DEFINITELY tell you how they normally work, and I have yet to be surprised by the conventions of one of this type of game. If you do certain things, you won't generally end up on the equivalent of the 9th dungeon level with your level 2 PC. That's just basically how it is. This is what I call 'gamability' of the setting/play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Well, I don't see how you could call a 'hidden rules' game really a game. It is simply an exercise in puzzle-solving, at best, or a blundering around at random. The THEORY is OK that in an RPG the fiction should provide all the input you need, but that is preposterously unrealistic. We all quickly realized, even Gary and Dave realized, that it isn't fun to play that game. The players have far fewer sources of information, and are in a far less than realistic position to judge what might or might not be important. Furthermore, as Gary plainly notes in his 1e DMG, realism is not fun!

But I think this is why I see that a lot of the gaming where there is a demand for high verisimilitude tends towards low-stakes play. You can botch it up a bit, a lot of the assumptions and lack of detail just doesn't rise to the level of mattering much when you are RPing a shopping expedition.

 

[Pedantic]

OK, this is still what I was talking about. The player can still try to hear or see through the door. They may or may not have to roll for it, depending on the game, but they can still do it. Because once they have done such a thing, those guards exist (It's Schrodinger's dungeon). And if you use this type of rolling in a game where GM prep is normal or that otherwise lets you populate an area with encounters, they could also have always been there, too, just like in a trad game.

And if the player doesn't listen at the door, then whether those guards exist or not depends on whether the GM uses that (there are guards in the next room who hear you pick the lock) as the result of a bad roll or not.

I mean, what if instead of guards throwing dice, they're reading quietly or sleeping but not snoring, and their position isn't obvious from the door's location? The PCs can listen as much as they like, but they're not going to hear soft breathing, and if they don't have a ring of X-ray vision then they're SoL anyway, no matter the system.

I'm not sure how to read any of that as an argument in favor of a fail forward model. Either you're introducing yet more points of failure if those perceptions rolls are subject to the same risks, or you're proposing a play pattern where the correct approach is to first anticipate all fiction the DM might establish in response to your proposal and then carefully employ "safe" techniques that don't risk an unknown consequence until the complication becomes known preemptively, or it is no longer possible for a complication to be introduced on failure. That mostly just seems like negotiating complications ahead of time with extra steps.

Setting that all aside, the question of entirely unknowable complications (the silent, imperceptible guards) is, I think, best answered with increased PC capability to reduce the number of such situations that can occur. We've got arcane eye, druids turning into mice, that classic mirror under the door trick, and so on. I just don't think entirely secret situations happen that often, and that you can make system level design choices about what's available to the PCs to make them even less so. As you build out more system detail, the situations where it is appropriate to render a complication in the moment become rarer and rarer.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But something that only exists because you failed a roll. If it works for you, great. It doesn't for me. Why can't you just accept that we have different preferences?

I accept that you have different preferences. I don’t accept your description of mine.

I mean, I expect that when you think someone’s not accurately describing methods that you might enjoy, you might say something about it.

Because the roll is about trying to climb a wall (presumably using a metric related to climbing), not why you're climbing a wall. That's a separate roll if it's a roll at all. If you make a roll to see if you successfully make a sword in your forge, what would your reason for making that sword have to do with that roll?

It’s a roll to determine why you’re climbing the wall? What?

I don’t think there’s a reason to separate the intended goal and the attempt of the task itself. It seems very odd to me.

If I’m climbing a wall, or performing any other task, there’s a reason, right? I’m doing X to get Y, or something similar. I don’t see why you would totally ignore Y and focus solely on X in and of itself.

It seems very odd to me… and isolated in a way such a thing wouldn’t be in a living, breathing world. It feels disconnected.

You could fail to climb it. You could conceivably injure yourself (I've certainly done that trying to climb a wall). It is inherently an at least moderately dangerous activity. There's a reason right there. The stakes don't have to be unconnected to physically climbing the wall, and they don't have to be dramatic.

No one is talking about unconnected stakes, that’s the thing.

No one is talking about results being “dramatic”. We’ve been talking about them being meaningful, or interesting.

Get past the cliff first, then we'll resolve what becomes of your friend.

Right. This is one of the ways that moving the decision to the mechanics… to the gameplay… allows for player agency.

In the games of many folks here, I imagine that the player could make their climb check and get to the top whole and as quickly as possible… and the GM could then say “but you’re still too late… your friend has been killed”.

Keeping the roll so focused on success/failure of the task attempted rather than the resolution of the situation means that the GM gets to continue calling the shots.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Right--and because you're avoiding nonsensical results, jumping back in time to gather herbs impose constraints. You can't have anything too interesting happen during the gathering because then the players may have acted differently. You assumed in advance it wouldn't be interesting and therefore imposed that it isn't interesting.

This differs from playing out the herb gathering in the present, where you can find a rare herb, observe evidence of magical disease, stumble upon a hidden grotto, meet a powerful patron, discover a camp belonging to a faction, catch sight of an advance party for an army on the march...

Do you see why these resolution methods differ?

Yes!

You are saying you’d rather spend time on the herb gathering on the off-chance that something interesting happens.

I’m saying I’d skip past that to something that I’m certain the players will find interesting! And if it turns out someone would have wanted to try and gather herbs while traveling, then we can handle it afterward.

But… it honestly depends on the game in question. If travel is meant to be dangerous, and if the game system allows for consequences that matter, then sure, it may make sense to handle the travel in detail. In my Stonetop game, we regularly handled travel as a potentially dangerous situation.

But it suits that game, and the system supports it. This helps make it more engaging. It helps make it interesting.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I accept that you have different preferences. I don’t accept your description of mine.

I mean, I expect that when you think someone’s not accurately describing methods that you might enjoy, you might say something about it.



It’s a roll to determine why you’re climbing the wall? What?

I don’t think there’s a reason to separate the intended goal and the attempt of the task itself. It seems very odd to me.

If I’m climbing a wall, or performing any other task, there’s a reason, right? I’m doing X to get Y, or something similar. I don’t see why you would totally ignore Y and focus solely on X in and of itself.

It seems very odd to me… and isolated in a way such a thing wouldn’t be in a living, breathing world. It feels disconnected.



No one is talking about unconnected stakes, that’s the thing.

No one is talking about results being “dramatic”. We’ve been talking about them being meaningful, or interesting.



Right. This is one of the ways that moving the decision to the mechanics… to the gameplay… allows for player agency.

In the games of many folks here, I imagine that the player could make their climb check and get to the top whole and as quickly as possible… and the GM could then say “but you’re still too late… your friend has been killed”.

Keeping the roll so focused on success/failure of the task attempted rather than the resolution of the situation means that the GM gets to continue calling the shots.

Nice to see how you're always able to bring it back to "GM making any decisions = GM making all important decisions = bad play".

 

[hawkeyefan]

Nice to see how you're always able to bring it back to "GM making any decisions = GM making all important decisions = bad play".

I didn’t say anything about it being bad play.

Do you really not see my point?