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

[AnotherGuy]

That raises a good question. Is there any way to procedurally generate content that won’t make a traditional oriented player feel like only the rolls matter?

Lets use that example of the party trying to break into a kitchen (forget the rest of the backstory, as I have not been following every single post). Spying through the kitchen window they spot a cat that's watching them intently. The cat is the only other living creature in the kitchen.
The GM calls for a lockpicking roll and the result lands in the Success with Complication category and so narrates that the rogue successfully unlocks the door, but the sound of the lockpicking made the cat bolt abruptly out of the kitchen knocking over a teaspoon into the sink and causing some commotion.
Maybe someone who saw the cat bolt out of the kitchen goes to investigate but the PCs have some moments to prep as they hear the footsteps of the approaching person. i .e. (they can close the door without entering the kitchen and wait for the person to leave hopefully, they can hide in the pantry or they can prepare an ambush etc)

What essentially I'm doing above is introducing fiction (the existence of a cat) beforehand which fiction may allow for Fail Forward to generate more content (the approaching person).
I believe that may be acceptable to a more Trad-style player?

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't think it matters when generation occurs as long as the rule used for generation is established beforehand. For example, the "cook is encountered on 2-in-6", it's fine for the roll to take place when the players would first see signs of the cooks presence.

But the 2-in-6 chance could change based on the events in play right? Say initially there’s a 1 in 3 chance for wolves in the forest. The players really hate wolves (or think they can make a lot of money selling their furs) so proceed to hunt and maybe get other to hunt as many as possible for them.

Should that chance be updated to maybe 1 in 10 due to the players actions?

Yes, this seems ok to me at least broadly. Although I can imagine there are specific cases where I would dislike it.

That’s fair. I’d be interested in an example of where it wouldn’t be.

 

[FrogReaver]

Lets use that example of the party trying to break into a kitchen (forget the rest of the backstory, as I have not been following every single post). Spying through the kitchen window they spot a cat that's watching them intently. The cat is the only other living creature in the kitchen.
The GM calls for a lockpicking roll and the result lands in the Success with Complication category and so narrates that the rogue successfully unlocks the door, but the sound of the lockpicking made the cat bolt abruptly out of the kitchen knocking over a teaspoon into the sink and causing some commotion.
Maybe someone who saw the cat bolt out of the kitchen goes to investigate but the PCs have some moments to prep as they hear the footsteps of the approaching person. i .e. (they can close the door without entering the kitchen and wait for the person to leave hopefully, they can hide in the pantry or they can prepare an ambush etc)

What essentially I'm doing above is introducing fiction (the existence of a cat) beforehand which fiction may allow for Fail Forward to generate more content (the approaching person).
I believe that may be acceptable to a more Trad-style player?

Maybe. I think they may view you as having just pushed the actual problem off to the cat instead of the person coming to the door. Unless the cat wasn’t just made up at that moment as a posthoc justification.

I also think it may fail the plausibility test for a more traditional oriented player. The cat knocking something over and someone hearing that and coming to investigate is a string of coincidences that aren’t all that likely to actually occur, especially at the very moment you are trying to break in.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I’m with you on the ogre. The quantum mischaracterization here seems just as applicable to random encounter tables.

That isn’t to say there aren’t differences in this and random encounter tables, but the issue isn’t that it’s not decided till the moment of the roll, else we would all avoid random encounter tables like fish in the break room.

In @maxperson’s defense he did say earlier that he typically uses random encounter tables before the session, so I guess in a sense he does avoid them just like fish in the break room.

Yeah. I just feel like there's this immense kind of mental gymnastics that goes on around "this stuff is ultimately just made up by the GM." Now, there can be a legitimate reason to favor stuff being made up far in advance and then stuck to assiduously. But that argument is a gamist one, to make the challenges 'fair contests' of player skill. I see no sign @Maxperson advocates for that. If it's the actual reason, he can win me over instantly by saying so. There's other posters whom I think might be more in that camp though, like @Pedantic

 

[The Firebird]

But the 2-in-6 chance could change based on the events in play right? Say initially there’s a 1 in 3 chance for wolves in the forest. The players really hate wolves (or think they can make a lot of money selling their furs) so proceed to hunt and maybe get other to hunt as many as possible for them.

Should that chance be updated to maybe 1 in 10 due to the players actions?

Yes, that seems ok to me.

That’s fair. I’d be interested in an example of where it wouldn’t be.

I guess if the table doesn't reasonably reflect the game state. E.g., a villain who is on continent A appears on the list with the same probability as one on continent B.

 

[FrogReaver]

Yeah. I just feel like there's this immense kind of mental gymnastics that goes on around "this stuff is ultimately just made up by the GM." Now, there can be a legitimate reason to favor stuff being made up far in advance and then stuck to assiduously. But that argument is a gamist one, to make the challenges 'fair contests' of player skill. I see no sign @Maxperson advocates for that. If it's the actual reason, he can win me over instantly by saying so. There's other posters whom I think might be more in that camp though, like @Pedantic

I see both sides repeatedly refer to gamist issues in their non-favored style. I think that elides the fact that there are other priorities at stake than just gamism and is why such statements aren’t persuasive to anyone. If I want the dynamic drama given by narrativist approaches it really isn’t going to matter to me if I have to sacrifice some elements of gamism for them. Same with simulation. The thing is, we all still want gamist elements that mesh with our narrativist or simulationist priorities.

The conclusion seems to be. Some gamism doesn’t mesh with simulation, other gamism doesn’t mesh with narrativism. And simulation and narrativism rarely mesh well together.

I can list you the pros and cons of each priority. It gets a lot harder though when contrasting games where they are mixed together. And even then one may generally have their priorities figured out but still dislike a specific implementation for them for other reasons.

 

[Faolyn]

I must have missed this the first time round.

If memory serves (this happened in about 1992), there was quite a bit of laughter along with the rueful hair-pulling every time someone came up with an answer and it turned out to be wrong. The very fact I remember that sequence this long afterwards and not in an "I never want to play through that again" sense tells me it can't have been all bad.

The longest combat I've ever run was also about 2-and-a-half sessions. Nowhere near as much cheering afterwards, though: the party mostly lost and the few survivors had to negotiate for the return of the corpses of their fallen so as to get them revived; in return giving up an artifact they'd just spent ages getting their mitts on.

A typical adventure in our crew is about 8-10 sessions including between-adventure downtime, though for the last year or so they've been super-efficient and are cracking along at about a 5-6 session average for adventures I mostly expected would take a lot longer.

As for that door, I wish I could remember the exact riddle he used on us - I'd post it here if I did, but all I remember is one line of it (I think there were four) and the answer.

OK, then, I apologize. But then I have no idea why you would use the word "frustrating" if it wasn't in fact, frustrating.

 

[Yaarel]

I see both sides repeatedly refer to gamist issues in their non-favored style. I think that elides the fact that there are other priorities at stake than just gamism and is why such statements aren’t persuasive to anyone. If I want the dynamic drama given by narrativist approaches it really isn’t going to matter to me if I have to sacrifice some elements of gamism for them. Same with simulation. The thing is, we all still want gamist elements that mesh with our narrativist or simulationist priorities.

The conclusion seems to be. Some gamism doesn’t mesh with simulation, other gamism doesn’t mesh with narrativism. And simulation and narrativism rarely mesh well together.

I can list you the pros and cons of each priority. It gets a lot harder though when contrasting games where they are mixed together. And even then one may generally have their priorities figured out but still dislike a specific implementation for them for other reasons.

I tend to view "gamist" and "simulationist" as the same thing.

I am assuming by the distinction, gamist specifically means formulating "mechanics" in a way that is either "win" or "lose", and emphasizing challenge and competition?

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't think this is really true.

Let's say we have a scenario where there are two paths through a wood. One passes by a cave where an Ogre lairs and the other passes by a stream where the Ogre fishes sometimes. The party is informed by a reliable local that the Ogre is normally found near it's lair, but sometimes goes down to the stream to fish, but the Ogre doesn't appear to do it on any particular schedule.

Behind the scenes, let's say there's a 75% chance the Ogre will be at their cave and a 25% chance it'll be at the stream. The party decides to head along to the stream.

I don't think it's true that if the DM rolls for where the Ogre is 5 seconds before they make that choice it means something and if they roll 5 seconds later it doesn't. The characters had actionable, if probabilistic intelligence to act upon and the probability of encountering the Ogre is identical either way. As long as the players get to declare actions before encountering the Ogre and that's informed by where the Ogre is determined to be, the precise timing of the roll is pretty irrelevant.

In your particular example there wouldn’t be a difference. But depending on precisely the players do in that 5 seconds it might matter a great deal. And of course @Maxperson is talking about much longer timeframes than 5 seconds in advance.

 

[FrogReaver]

I tend to view "gamist" and "simulationist" as the same thing.

I am assuming by the distinction, gamist specifically means formulating "mechanics" in a way that is either "win" or "lose", and emphasizing challenge and competition?

Close enough.