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

[CreamCloud0]

Sure, but why? It's a dice roll that tells us the cook is there, which is something that you said you're fine with. Prefer, actually.

because it's creating a connection between two fundamentally unrelated events, why should the presence of the cook be at all dependent on the rogue's ability to pick locks?

 

[Enrahim]

In Shadowdark iirc the monsters all have darkvision, so the light doesn't help them see anything. They avoid it as a threat.

I adressed this exact proposal in the post you replied to.

For a few encounters you could argue the strongly disadvantaged characters makes for a less intimidating target, but that doesn't fly with a lot of them.

Minor shadowdark quickstart spoiler
You are trying to tell me that the minotaur in the quickstart adventure is as likely to think "nope, too scary let me go in the other direction" when seeing that light, as manning itself up to bellow his challenges? (The meeting rate with the minotaur roughly doubles when light is out)

 

[FrogReaver]

No, because PbtA is not a system which requires Fail Forward! It is perfectly OK for a 6- to simply be "you failed, AND <bad thing X> just happened to you!" I am just saying that in DW/AW (probably most other PbtAs) IF you have a forward failure, then it has to be pretty explicitly "success + bad thing" because PbtA moves are triggered on actions, which are fairly specific things and not "when I set/act on a goal." @pemerton's case in BW is thus different, because BW adjudicates INTENT, so you fail your intent, but your action is carried out successfully. The difference, in the end, is not huge, and in a fictional sense 'non-success' can play out pretty similarly, but they do map a bit differently in terms of mechanics and process.

This is maybe the most helpful post I've seen on the differences between those games and their resolution methods.

 

[The Firebird]

I adressed this exact proposal in the post you replied to.

I was responding to your point about light making the targets more visible.

 

[FrogReaver]

because it's creating a connection between two fundamentally unrelated events, why should the presence of the cook be at all dependent on the rogue's ability to pick locks?

mostly it would be - because that's the particular game being played.

Why should the Rogue being undetected while breaking into the house depend on his lockpicking roll? Yet most of us will have no issue lumping those 2 outcomes under a single lockpicking check.

 

[FrogReaver]

Yes, of course.


For me, she is involved. She is in the house somewhere, and that will determine the consequences of the players actions.


This sums up my main problem with the approach. It makes everything dependent on the rolls rather than player choices. For a bad roll, the complications can be a cook, or a hound, or the Lord, or whatever...but it doesn't really matter, because none of these things existed beforehand.

I want to go deeper than that. Why does it matter to you whether they existed beforehand? What are you gaining if that's the case as opposed to it not being the case?

 

[Enrahim]

Does it matter? If there's a factor that renders noise relevant (i.e. someone to hear it) then a player might want to do something about it. If not, then it doesn't matter if of they do, though perhaps they'll feel it a worthwhile precaution to take anyway, working without full information.

I sort of take the opposite view from conflict resolution here; anything that can be resolved with a single action can't be a challenge, because the player doesn't have the ability to really make decisions about how to deal with it. It's why I jumped to "get the heirloom" from "open the locked door."

The door is trivial. The only real outcomes are "can't get in," "get in without be resource expenditure," or "get in without resource expenditure." You need a higher complexity goal with multiple action declarations between the players and success to really have a challenge.

I think you must have missed the context. This is the example we are discussing (some steps up the reply chain)

Is this a potential loophole in your approach?
Player: "I try to stay unnoticed when entering the house"
GM: "Ok, how?"
Player: "By picking the lock rather than breaking down the crude bamboo door"
GM: "Fine, roll me a thief tools check".
Would a valid interpretation of a failure here be that the PC enters the house, but is noticed in the process? Mind you, I do not ask what your initial gut reaction. It is more like if there are circumstances where you could see yourself narrating a noisy entry. For instance if the act of entering the house itself isn't particularly challenging (there are windows, back doors, and a gaping hole in the roof under repair), so the only thing really interesting is how the house is entered.

For this example staying unnoticed is clearly relevant enough for the player that this is what they ask for in their initial request. The context here is also how to interpret this situation in a very particular form of principled trad play task resolution. While your observations about the virtues of higher level conflict resolution for this kind of scenario might be correct, I fail to see how they are relevant for this particular context?

 

[Pedantic]

Decign and principles are hard. If this principle as formulated here the game "Flip a coin whenever you are unsure" would be more complete than any of the mainstream RPGs.

Sure. It would also be a terrible game, with basically no agency.

I actually think all post TSR D&D variants and their closest relatives have had minimising GM rulings as a virtue. However this need to be balanced against other concerns. For instance detailed rules for certain actions make these actions feel better in play, but it increases the need for GM rulings for the actions not covered compared to a bland generic system. So just by introducing action based rules you have made a sacrifice with regard to your completeness ideal.

Your proposal appear to be to adding on even more action rules in order to reduce the number of cases where GM rulings are needed/problematic. And while this indeed can work, the more you do it the more you sacrifice a different design principle: Simplicity and ease of play. And you seem to acknowledge that you won't be able to get to perfection anyway..

I mean, I don't really care, personally. Simplicity is widely overvalued on RPG design, and is frustratingly mistaken for elegance, or treated as "cheap" in terms of design space, when it's really quite expensive. You give up a lot of depth of decision making to have fewer rules.

I've played board games more complicated than many RPGs that manage in 30 pages. If we're working with multiple 300 page books, we should be able get a pretty solidly action complete system down. Frankly, I have a lot more sympathy in my heart for a game that tries. It's the press of "your GM may call for," "if your GM decides," or "the GM will set a difficulty" that's frustrating. Actively choosing to leave design work as an exercise for the reader makes it much harder to love these games.

Modern trad game design is a balancing act between ease of use and granularity/richness. The way it try to counter GM rulings is not to increase granularity, but rather to make the grains fit as tightly together as possible, covering as much of the posibility space as possible given the desired level on the ease/richness scale.

so if you throw ease of use out of the window you easily can go to quite a bit higher granularity than today's mainstream, and with that increased granularity you might be in a position to provide better coverage than the less granular. But even this has an important limitation: if you become too granular the risk of significant overlap also increases. I guess you would agree that an "overcomplete" system where the GM has to chose between 3 different described actions that might fit the situation is as bad as the situation where the situation is not fitting any of the described actions?

I honestly don't know that I've ever faced this problem, without bringing in 3rd party supplements that have redundant subsystems. More importantly, I don't think the GM should be making that decision; action declarations belong to players. It would be profoundly disempowering and unfair to change their function calls to other rules without their agreement.

Have you heard about flux? Is that a TTRPG? Or if the range of victory conditions for that is not broad enough - have you heard of the card game MAO? (That one is an interesting case study, as that is also somewhat conforming to my attempt at defining a core aspect of TTRPG)

Fluxx is a classic of ameritrash design, and avoided in the hobby space much like Munchkin is, for similar reasons. I don't think it qualifies; the victory condition is meta stable, in that it's always "stick a victory condition card and a relevant tableau."

MAO is a more interesting case, but I think the lack of stable interaction rules is the issue there, and the fact that play can't continue from an existing board state after evaluation. That, and it's actually comparatively quite restrictive about setting victory conditions; you can only do so at specific times, you can't do so reactively as you fail to meet one, and you're relying on the ability to alter the entire structure of play as you go to do so, not a specific ability to change the goal you're shooting for.

That does clarify something though, I do think you're highlighting that fixed interaction rules might be necessary for a formal definition.

I think it is hard to get away from a player controlling a single fictional entity as a requirement for something to be considered a TTRPG. However with this in place I think our attempts at formulating "the rest" might be so that my requirement is slightly stricter than your. I think an unlimited set of possible actions will imply that the form can support updatable win conditions. I can however envision limited action games that do support updatable victory conditions. If such a hypotetical game seem to satisfy your thirst for TTRPGing, I have no objections to that. For me however I think I would feel like something essential is missing But I guess I could accept that the result would be distinct from what I would naturally talk about as a "board game". So you seem to be pointing to something essential.

Yeah, my point is that I think it's more definitional of the form than the "tactical infinity" concept. Requiring one participant to be there for on the fly game design work shouldn't be necessary to be playing a TTRPG, but it is certainly a feature they could have.

 

[AlViking]

Here's two examples from play of the sort of "Fail Forward" that I've previously defined (the scene changes on a roll), and that @clearstream cited from Daggerheart's rules text:

- (Stonetop, PBTA) The party is exploring an old barrow. There's sconces on the walls of rusted old iron, that flicker to life with silent eerie green flame when they approach. Marshall the Marshal declares he's studying one closely, trying to see if there's any way to like get ahold of it or perhaps take them back to Stonetop. I suggest he sounds like he's Seeking Insight here, he confirms and rolls. A lovely 4, so a Miss. I say "you can see that the flames are emanating from the blackened bones of a human, many of them - piled at the bottom... also as your companions slowly creep up the stairs here they start to hear the sound of metal scraping on stone, like the links of a massive chain dragging across the floor - and then you all start to hear an echoing rhythmic barking from up top - what do you do?"

- (Songs for the Dusk, FITD) The crew is racing cross-country in their buggy, a fast-mover located on radar coming up shadowing them. They know this has to be the Corundrum Paladin that's been making life hard for them (it was the Fallout from last mission after all). Their goal is to get to a sheltered spot Sol found on the map where they can turn and fight. I tell them that yeah, that's doable but this is risky as heck - they might totally flip the buggy here which will, well, complicate matters. I ask what they do, Ada describes how she's got all her processors focused on steering as Sol navigates, going full on rally mode, barking out instructions (he spends a Stress to Aid and give her +1d for her pool).

Ada rolls 4d6 and gets a 1,2,2,3 (ouch). That's a Miss. I describe the juddering of the wheel in her grip, the clods of mud flying everywhere, and then that sudden sinking sensation as the buggy just starts to tip too far and her gyroscopes can tell they're about to go over...and because this is a game with Resistance mechanics, I now ask if she wants to Resist the outcome (technically Push Herself, but shush). She does, I ask how, she describes fighting the wheel and buggy into a long side skid instead - and her overstressed servos result in a fair bit of Stress spent to do this. They're now sitting there stationary, facing back they way they came but not tipped over, only a moment to spare before that fast-mover is upon them so I ask..."what do you do?"

I appreciate the examples but I still wouldn't want to use the technique. Probably because I don't care if Marshall doesn't learn anything from their action, I don't understand the jargon from the 2nd example enough to comment other than to say it's not my style of game. But again, the issue here is that we're on a D&D subforum, D&D general label and you make no attempt to relate what's happening into D&D terms or how it could possibly apply to a D&D game. That's why I thought the locked door/chef example was better. It may not be what you would do in Songs for the Dusk but at a certain point we're comparing apples to baseballs.

But in the 1st example I don't see there to be a reason for the sound of metal or barking to be triggered off the failed check. I would have rather seen those two things happen no matter what and if the check had been successful the characters get some bonus that helps them in the ensuing scenario.

 

[Enrahim]

I was responding to your point about light making the targets more visible.

I was not responding to your response about my point about targets being more visible. I was responding to your claim that

They avoid it as a threat.

Which I have a hard time reading as anything else than a response to my claim it is hard to find any causal connection between shadowdark's light out system and increased the increased rate of encounters that system prescribe in darkness.