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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Gary speaking for all persons at all times and places, as to what they will count fun?

Oh, come now. He's mostly just explicating what every successful game designer knows. If you want to know that sort of thing, why not take the word of the (maybe second) most influential designer? He's sure a lot more of an authority than any of us. But of course I don't think he speaks for all tastes or that he was right universally, so why even fling this brick?

But finally, as Gary's own play was clearly of a type that is closely related to the sandbox play this specific thread was discussing, what could be more appropriate? I eagerly await illumination!

 

[Pedantic]

I mentioned this way back earlier in the thread, but my personal opinion is that "detection" and "perception" abilities work against the strong framing of conflict the GM could use to push the narrative.

The general use of a perception ability in D&D-likes is to gate the GM's narration of the local environment behind a skill check or roll. Which means the existence of that ability already presupposes some kind of map-and-key/prepped environment play.

See, this is a great summation of the ongoing fight about language. That's a narrativist summation of what's happening; I'd propose the GM is an attempt to generate and report on a fictional setting that players can interact with via mechanical mediation. The GM is an imperfect technology for this purpose, but the best option that exists.

"Framing" is framing; describing the events that are happening, the GM narrating, the player responding, dice presenting difficult to quantify restrictions on their utterances, does not describe the thing without acknowledging what is actually being attempted. Intent matters, though frankly I think we're still dealing with gross differences in technique that there's too much eagerness to group together.

 

[Pedantic]

I would agree. I mean, the entire point of a fail-forward game with focus on narrative generation is that there is no defined fail state. There might be an unpleasant ending wherein the PCs fail to accomplish their goals, to be sure; that's different from the focus of play being an environmental "puzzle box" that can be solved if the pieces are manipulated correctly. (Basically, running the game like an even more open-ended BG3.)

I'm leery of talk of puzzles and solutions when it comes to describing gameplay, but that's broadly right. I'm now just reflexively braced for "and that works for dungeon crawling but not for...." that always comes next.

 

[TwoSix]

See, this is a great summation of the ongoing fight about language. That's a narrativist summation of what's happening; I'd propose the GM is an attempt to generate and report on a fictional setting that players can interact with via mechanical mediation. The GM is an imperfect technology for this purpose, but the best option that exists.

Sure. And I think the narrative critique against that style of play (or why they don't prefer it), can be overly simplified into "The DM is so limited as a conveyer of a fictional space that why don't you just lean into what a group of humans is actually good at, which is being imaginative with each other and telling stories?"

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There is a fix to this, though 5e-by-RAW types sure wouldn't like it.

If A's initiative is 15 and her declared action is to move, then attack, then duck for cover the fix is to roll to see how many initiative 'pips' each of those sub-actions takes. For example, it's set by her original initiave roll that her move starts on 15 but she doesn't attack until 11 then clearly she's moving during pips 14, 13, and 12. And if she doesn't reach cover until a 5 then she's open to being shot by anyone with init 6 or higher.

Thus, if B's initiative is anywhere between 6 and 14 he can shoot at her, if it's 5 or less he cannot* because by then she's got cover.

* - well, technically he still can if he wants to, but with no hope of hitting.

Oye! Exactly how many encounters would you manage in an evening? People said 4e combat was too slow!

 

[TwoSix]

I'm leery of talk of puzzles and solutions when it comes to describing gameplay, but that's broadly right. I'm now just reflexively braced for "and that works for dungeon crawling but not for...." that always comes next.

I mean, you can't have a gamist game (which you seem to prefer) without some kind of win condition or at least a metric of success, right?

 

[TwoSix]

Oye! Exactly how many encounters would you manage in an evening? People said 4e combat was too slow!

Nothing wrong with that! I also enjoy a rousing game of Robo Rally!

 

[Pedantic]

I mean, you can't have a gamist game (which you seem to prefer) without some kind of win condition or at least a metric of success, right?

Left to my druthers, I would go a step further and say "you can't have a game" at all, but that's unnecessarily hostile in this space, and you could find people even in board games who would disagree.

I just think that's a facile and limited way to look at RPGs specifically; I've argued before their constituent component is the ability to set and revise their own victory conditions and for play to continue after evaluation with new goals.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I feel like reflection on the vastly greater number of permutations of actual play defeats the "plenty possible" claim here. It's not 6, 8, 4, it's more like 6897362106120896598748907234157990745, 83791457390874390878097432, 48036214091861289745601298735496. And I still have not used enough digits by orders of magnitude.

I like the "no different to human perception" notion more, but believe that humans are still more perceptive than needs to be believed for that to work out.

I feel the 'other contributions' line of argument might contain the most potential. One could claim something like 'other contributions' drown out any informing or inflecting from lowlights. Against that, one could call for examples to see if that seems at all common. And I suppose those contributions will also need to drown out any informing or inflecting between highlights, which seems to make them an argument for "It doesn't matter what I do in each moment of play, because what happens in subsequent moments is down to what is introduced in those moments." I don't totally hate that line of argument, but I can't help feeling it might lead nowhere good...

Let's approach it from a perspective of what is more realistically likely play. First, the intensity and salience of any given bit of play is probably not totally clear beforehand. So even some super intense play has lulls, and some of those will end up, on reflection, being fictionally significant. Hino tried to equip her section so they could take on some task, but failed. It was basically a shopping trip, nothing dramatic happened, but it was pretty significant in terms of leading to a later failure which bent the succeeding narrative a good bit.

So, Narrativist sorts of play DO have plenty of variation in pace and intensity, but I would say in most of these games significant play is frequent and makes up a lot of the play.

 

[Enrahim]

Sure. And I think the narrative critique against that style of play (or why they don't prefer it), can be overly simplified into "The DM is so limited as a conveyer of a fictional space that why don't you just lean into what a group of humans is actually good at, which is being imaginative with each other and telling stories?"

And the standard answer is of course "because that is a different activity than the one we love?"