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

[Lanefan]

My goal is [...] to look at what D&D does, and what it has done traditionally, and to see where/how it may change.

D&D is not beyond critique.

I'm not going to argue with that for any edition; though the targets of criticism will be different in each.

Citing a criticism of the design is not "bashing on" anything. This thread is about discussion of how D&D and its fans may be able to change.

Thing is, what some people criticize about D&D can be the same thing(s) that other people see as its strength(s).

An example from this thread: the task-based resolution that D&D uses has been (pardon the pun but I can't resist) taken to task now and then in here, yet I see it as a strength: if you deal with resolving the individual tasks as they arise, one way or another the overarching goal will very likely take care of resolving itself.

But in looking at D&D and considering what it may do different, I'm going to look at other RPGs and see how they handle things.

If-when I look at other RPGs, I'm always looking at them from the stance of "What's this game got, that's better than what I already have, that I can port into my existing system?".

For instance... fail forward has been discussed ad nauseum at this point. As a GM of D&D, why would I just outright reject the use of this potential tool? And even if I did decide that for me (for whatever idiosyncratic reason) I simply will never use such a tool... why object to it being an option for others? It's a great option for a GM to have, regardless of the game that's being played.

I don't mind the idea of fail-forward as long as it doesn't turn the outcome of the root task from a failure into a success. Every task has an immediate and obvious goal attached (e.g. reach the cliff top, open the lock, get across the chasm, find a curative herb), where 'success' on the roll means you achieved that immediate goal and 'fail' means you did not.

The success-fail result of the roll itself with regard to that root-task goal should IMO be sacrosanct. After that you can toss in complications on a narrowly-made success roll or maybe-beneficial consequences on a marrowly missed 'fail' roll. An example of the latter might be that when trying to climb the cliff, a narrow fail could mean that while you're still nowhere near the top and aren't going to get there, partway up you've stumbled onto a cleft or cave that can't be seen from the bottom...maybe there's something useful in there, or dangerous, or nothing?

If the underlying (and unspoken) idea is to just have them succeed at the root task more often, lower the DC (or system equivalent).

 

[Enrahim]

More the point was that "showing your work", as it were, exclusively after "your work" no longer communicates anything, won't really affect the trust-o-meter. It won't hurt, or at least it shouldn't if the players are reasonable. But nothing is really gained or sustained in the trust department by only revealing mechanics after they've become irrelevant.

Conversely, there would be a significant potential for gain if you show the work while that work is still relevant, because then the players can see you playing by the rules you've set. It isn't perfect, paranoia can always find an excuse of course, but at least for me I would very much appreciate that gesture, whereas I really wouldn't feel much of anything (except mild curiosity) if shown a mechanic when it's been reduced to pure novelty information.


Well, I don't genrally make that kind of assumption unless there's a reason to. But even if we grant that? Probably would tell them at least the general outline after the end of their first (or second, if it seems like there will be more than two) encounter. Doesn't have to be specific numbers, just descriptive stuff. Generally, I'd try to choose effects that would leave reasonable evidence behind, e.g. something that burns leaving scorch marks where it fell, something that induces sleep having the sound of a lullaby, etc. Something beneficial might have the sound of a battle theme or feel like the gentle warmth of a campfire or the like, depending on what the effect is.

The way I see it, while learning about an obstacle is interesting up to a point, making smart decisions about information you do in fact have is almost always interesting. By informing the players while it still matters (even if it's not 100% guaranteed to be of significant importance), I'm giving them that chance to make informed decisions and even try to manipulate the situation in their favor (e.g. perhaps they come back with mirrors in the hope that they can reflect a color-flash at an enemy!) Further, that way, choices good and bad are squarely and obviously theirs.


Sure, but it doesn't then mean very much if you wait only until after the unusual thing is unequivocally never going to show up again. Further, plenty of unusual things can still be understood pretty well even without needing to be an expert on it first. A watering fountain would probably be mystifying to a neanderthal at first, but a little experimentation would have probably made him comfortable with it quickly. I find many PCs are in a similar boat, even if they don't know the precise theory they pick up the core essentials easily enough.


Ah. See, I thought this was "the players DID investigate and experiment, didn't learn anything, then the whole area was erased/destroyed and only then did I tell them the mechanics." Also it's now sounding like this was a singular event? Like they only interacted with that gem the one single time and then nothing else? I was under the impression that they had seen it and even limitedly/distantly interacted with it (e.g. not in the room itself), but despite multiple encounters nothing was really learned until after no more encounters could ever happen.

I think the important distinction here is the purpose of the mechanics. In this example the purpose of the mechanics appear to be to provide a consistent behavior that a right minded group could interact with to try to learn about, offering a possibility to feel "like a scientist". The exact same situation could be used for drastically different purposes.

For instance it could be used to show off the competence of the wizard. The GM states that the wizard think they see patterns, and offer them to study it for 1 hour and do an intelligence check. Depending on the result the GM hands over a complete, partial or plain incorrect version of the tables and procedures they actually use.

Or it could be used as a more pure probability risk minimizing puzzle. Here the characters could have been handed the procedure from some sages that has studied gem-lore all their lives beforehand; possibly as a flashback when they first encounter the gem.

Each of these gives a very different feel to the situation. All serves a purpose. Which is most appropriate also depends on the nature of the procedure. In this kind I find the procedure essentially so random that it is hard to see how to do anything crunchy with it as a puzzle with known parameters. As such it is not a good fit for the "show off competency" purpose, as once that scene is done there are not much good to do from it. However it is rich enough that it can provide a nice toy for the first purpose (though maybe a bit too complex for most groups). I hope it is obvious that in order for it to serve this purpose it cannot be revealed before it has become irrelevant (as otherwise the act of revealing it would be the thing causing it to lose its purpose)

So the claim would be that some times it is indeed good to hide the mechanics away from the players. Other times the mechanics is best put in the open. For instance if you are having an optional jousting contest with custom rules, it might be good to lay out the foundations for how you plan to resolve it before the players commit to participating. In this case figuring out the "mystery of jousting" trough trial and error is clearly not the purpose. Rather the purpose would likely be to give the players a new toy to try to optimize (the third option), or give the squire dreaming of becoming a knight a chance to shine (the second option)

 

[Lanefan]

You can see more of my thoughts in the post just above.

"Fail forward" is primarily the idea that nothing happens is not a permissible GM response.

Why can't it more consistently be "fail backward", though?

When breaking into a kitchen and failing the roll, why can't the narration be that a previously undetected alarm goes off, or that an unexpected electrical trap in the lock shocks the thief for [a bunch of damage, however the system does such things], etc.*, while - honouring the root 'fail' roll - the door remains locked? One of my favourites for such things is that the thief, thinking she was unlocking the door, has in fact just locked it i.e. for some reason it wasn't locked to begin with.

* - or even the old standby "the thief breaks her tools in the lock", but that one gets overused and thus a bit stale.

Secondarily - and this is perhaps better captured via the "no whiffing" formulation - is the idea that the narration of a failed check need not present the PC as incompetent. (See eg the example of me failing the test for Aedhros's singing.)

Ah, there's another place where I differ in philosophy from this lot: even the most competent people aren't perfect, and every now and then when under pressure they'll mess up on something they otherwise do consistently well all the time. The thief might pick that lock 100 times out of 100 while practicing in the guild hall, but the stress of doing it in the field when it counts - even if she has all night - might cause her to mess it up. And from all external appearances, that'll look like incompetence every time.

As for "no whiffing": even the very best hitters in baseball whiff on a fairly regular basis. Why should PCs be any different?

 

[Lanefan]

In my games if there is no negative consequence of failing a climb check and you will eventually make the climb but it doesn't matter how long it would take then I wouldn't ask for a check.

Unless your characters all come with built-in featherfall I'd think there's often going to be a negative consequence of failing a climb, and it'll hurt.

 

[Lanefan]

I think it was @Enrahim who upthread mentioned wandering monsters.

Wandering monsters are "quantum" beings. That's the essence of their use in classic D&D.

Indeed, but ideally they're not quantum: there's an in-fiction reason those wanderers are there and (unless there's a gate or spawner somewhere) in theory there should be a finite number of them after which there will be no more.

I ran a dungeon recently that had Mind Flayers (infrequent) and Gnolls (very frequent) as wandering monsters. The Gnolls were frequent because about 200 of them lived in this complex and they wandered around all over the place, but their numbers were finite and could be (and were!) whittled down. However, the Mind Flayers - though infrequently met - could in theory keep coming forever because the dungeon contained a gate to their home world; and after the PCs found that gate and shut it down, the Flayers stopped coming.

In the wilderness, it's a different story when the wandering "monsters" are typical local wildlife; they can keep coming forever unless they're major apex predators like lions or dragons.

Now maybe there is a type of contemporary play that eschews wandering monsters, or at least eschews them in the classic form, and that aspires to track the movements and actions of all the beings that exist in the setting. That would be less "quantum". But as you note, there are at least some prep-oriented posters who also seem to use something like random encounters in their games. Those are just as "quantum".

It's a mix: you more or less know what's out there (the random encounter table tells you, if nothing else), the random piece is which of it the PCs happen to bump into right this minute.

 

[Enrahim]

I'm not going to argue with that for any edition; though the targets of criticism will be different in each.

Thing is, what some people criticize about D&D can be the same thing(s) that other people see as its strength(s).

An example from this thread: the task-based resolution that D&D uses has been (pardon the pun but I can't resist) taken to task now and then in here, yet I see it as a strength: if you deal with resolving the individual tasks as they arise, one way or another the overarching goal will very likely take care of resolving itself.

If-when I look at other RPGs, I'm always looking at them from the stance of "What's this game got, that's better than what I already have, that I can port into my existing system?".

I don't mind the idea of fail-forward as long as it doesn't turn the outcome of the root task from a failure into a success. Every task has an immediate and obvious goal attached (e.g. reach the cliff top, open the lock, get across the chasm, find a curative herb), where 'success' on the roll means you achieved that immediate goal and 'fail' means you did not.

The success-fail result of the roll itself with regard to that root-task goal should IMO be sacrosanct. After that you can toss in complications on a narrowly-made success roll or maybe-beneficial consequences on a marrowly missed 'fail' roll. An example of the latter might be that when trying to climb the cliff, a narrow fail could mean that while you're still nowhere near the top and aren't going to get there, partway up you've stumbled onto a cleft or cave that can't be seen from the bottom...maybe there's something useful in there, or dangerous, or nothing?

If the underlying (and unspoken) idea is to just have them succeed at the root task more often, lower the DC (or system equivalent).

My bolding.

I agree to the principle, but the devil lies in the fact that we in trad play doesn't actually specify what is the failure mode for the task at hand. And most tasks can have several failure modes. This is the ambiguity that typically allow for fail forward in traditional play. In other words, I reject the bolded assertion.

Take the player saying "I pick the lock". A success on the roll typically would be expected to mean quite a few things:
1: The door is now unlocked.
2: The character did it in a reasonable amount of time
3: The character stayed silent while doing so
4: The door was left reasonably unharmed.
Which one of these are of the player's primary concern is generally not stated. For instance you as a GM might think that managing 1, 2, and 4, but making a bit of noise is an appropriate ", but" on a just barely succeeded roll. However the player might actually have preferred the door to not be opened (they could have taken the windows anyway) over making noise.

As such the approach that allow for the least GM bias would be the stance that all of these expectations is fulfilled on a success result. But what then about the failure result? To on a failure narrate "After working on the lock until dawn, your character loses patience, screams out in frustration and kicks the door so it leaves a dent" might be hilarious once, but is not conductive of a game that tries to take itself at least a little bit seriously. Hence the sane response to what should happen on a failure is that at least one of the things that would indicate a success did not happen, but not necessarily all.

And this is the conceptual "loophole" that allow for trad-fail forward. If you free your mind from the idea that it has to be number 1 that is the primary concern in the resolution, you could allow 1 while rather having one or more of the other success criteria fail.

 

[Lanefan]

Just so we're all clear: managing risk and avoiding obstacles are not the only dimensions of meaning that are possible in RPGing.

In games that use "fail forward" resolution, they are typically not that important at all.

If the in-fiction characters aren't managing risk and avoiding obstacles when-where they reasonably can, that doesn't say much for their collective wisdom.

 

[Lanefan]

That's fair. I am much more used to Dungeon World and similar PbtAs where intent is not as explicitly separated from tasks (sometimes not at all). So, FF in Dungeon World would require that the action, and thus the check, produces a result that is effectively successful, no matter what, but usually works against the character's, separate, goal. So, effectively, FF in DW would require that picking the lock always opens the door, but sets off an alarm or whatever. But this is of course also why FF is not mandatory in DW, it is perfectly OK for the GM to describe the outcome as "you can't pick the lock, AND you set of the alarm!" I mean, tastes may vary in individual situations. I think the ultimate result is pretty similar.

To the bolded: so in DW a character can never outright fail, or fail backwards, at an attempted task?

Yeah, that's a bit much.

 

[Lanefan]

No, that's not what I had said, though I was the one who gave the example.

My example was one where the player is fighting in a place where poison gas is present, and they have a random number of turns before it becomes unavoidably lethal but not instant death--so even if they beat their opponent, they may already be "dead" and just not yet knowing that. (If you prefer, you could think of it as radiation exposure rather than poison--something that doesn't kill instantly, but which a sufficient dosage will cause death eventually.)

Not much of a thrill to narrowly survive only to find out "oh, actually you were dead the whole time".

There's some who would think this was a hella cool way for their character to die (and who might also reference Moby Dick).

Still seems rather pointedly at odds with your previously-stated stance of "story is exclusively something that happens afterward when we reflect on what happened". Here, you seem to be advocating for mechanical setups which produce a particular experienced story, just with a layer of probability making it so the DM can't be certain of what will result.

To some extent that's going to happen regardless. If the module I'm running says the room they're about to enter is a mage's lab with the mage in it, the story I can expect to see in the very short term will be considerably different than if the upcoming room is the occupied lair of five wyverns or if it's a foot deep in gold coins or if it's completely empty except for the dust.

Here, there's a poison-immune opponent in a room full of slow-acting poison gas*. "A PC goes in there to fight the foe, defeats it, but then succumbs to the poison" is certainly a foreseeable outcome of this scenario but by no means is it the only one; there might not be an infinite number of ways to approach and-or deal with this situation, but there's sure a whole bunch of 'em.

There's always potential and-or foreseeable stories, but it's only afterwards can you see which one came out real.

* - which is a cool set-up that I just might have to use sometime - I like it!

 

[Lanefan]

GM: The party approaches the door and discovers it is locked.
Rogue player: My rogue quickly scratches around his satchel for his thief tools.....
Cleric player: Wait! Let my character cast silence to ensure you do not fumble or succeed with a complication which may or may not alert everyone in the household depending on the GM decides move.
Wizard player: Stand back gentlemen, this is a job for my character, as I will circumvent the plans of our overlord GM. As after our cleric casts Silence I will have my wizard cast Knock from 50 feet away. Thus we will ensure the opening of such door is a success negating the quantum failures, random encounters, fail forwards and complications that our devious GM would normally decide on.
Cleric player: Your verbal component of Knock will not pass through my Silence barrier so it will have no effect on the locked door.
Wizard player: Confound it!

Meanwhile everyone in the house is now wide awake listening to these guys have a long conversation in the garden...