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

[pemerton]

Which is why I was clarifying that the term "adventure" may not apply to any and all games. I can't possibly know or list the proper term for every game in existence.

I'm not talking about the word. As @Campbell has repeatedly posted in this thread, I'm talking about what play is about. What it is like.

You keep posting as if Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World aspire to produce an experience comparable to AD&D play, except using slightly different rules for PC building and which dice to roll. But they don't.

 

[pemerton]

I agree and this is a conclusion we reached a couple pages ago as well.

Why was it ever in doubt?

 

[pemerton]

I didn't make up the example, and I get that it's a bad one since the cook would almost surely not be in the kitchen, but it's the one that was brought up and is being discussed.

So why are you using it to show that "fail forward" can't work?

 

[The Firebird]

Why was it ever in doubt?

See thread title (and many comments made throughout)

 

[pemerton]

I want to clarify first that it's not "nothing happens" which fail forward is avoiding. You get that without fail forward, when someone is hanging onto a rope and fails, or when the guards are on your heels and you fail to pick the lock, and so forth. The issue isn't with nothing happens.

I'm not sure where this came from. Multiple posters upthread have expressly affirmed the "validity" and utility of "nothing happens" - you try to pick the lock, fail, nothing else happens, so you have to find another way in or else give up on getting into that place.

Instead, it seems to be with failed rolls adding new information which was unrelated to the check to the narrative. For example, the lockpick fails, and now there is a cook. What's-his-names song doesn't make him feel better and therefore a guard shows up. That sort of thing.

As I've already posted, "unrelated to the check" is false for two reasons:

(1) The point of the check is to find out if doing the thing goes well or poorly.

(2) The consequence is implicit in the context of the check - this is what Apocalypse World and similar games express via the notion that soft moves => hard moves.

If by "unrelated to the check" you mean not an immediate causal consequence of the bodily motions performed in making the check, well OK. But that is a very specific meaning of "unrelated".

this makes these games more, well, narrative--they're about telling a story more than playing a game.

It's fine if that's what you want. But it is opposed to what I want, and it's fair to recognize that.

And this is where I find apparent double standards for conversation a bit frustrating. Are you setting out to state your preferences? Or to describe my RPGing? I don't really care which, but upthread you seemed to assert the first but here you're doing the second. And in that case, I assume that you are happy for me to describe yours.

 

[Maxperson]

So why are you using it to show that "fail forward" can't work?

I haven't. I've said it doesn't work for me, because I prep stuff and it would end up with an absurdity if I did it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So there is a limit? Or there should be a limit?

I think there should be a limit, so in my games there is. IMO that's how everyone should do it if they have an issue with their game.

 

[AnotherGuy]

How do you envisage this being different from soft move => hard move?

I don't envisage it being different from a soft move (and I'm not an expert on pbta). I was just attempting to find some daylight between the two playstyles inspired from comments upthread from @TwoSix and @FrogReaver.

The soft move being the approaching steps which can still be mitigated by the party hiding successfully or neutralising the person before the rest of the household is alerted to their presence. Failure of the above seeing a hard move materialising as the party's attempt to break in stealthily are foiled.

 

[FrogReaver]

As I've already posted, "unrelated to the check" is false for two reasons:

(1) The point of the check is to find out if doing the thing goes well or poorly.

No. The point of the check is to find out if you are successful at whatever task you attempted. At least that’s it for traditional play. There’s a subtle but important difference there.

Part of the reason this discussion keeps failing is because the meaning of simply understood jargon from d&d gets overloaded by narrativist jargon and that muddles ever bit of the conversation from there. And no one starts with these axiomatic differences so of course we reach different conclusions and appear to end up at a total impasse.

If one changes what rolls mean, what the purpose of play is and a ton of other non-trivial things about the game then everything works fine, but doing that means I have no easy language to communicate what I like or dislike about such changes. The terms have all been overloaded and so when I say one thing it’s always understood differently, essentially from the perspective of a totally alien game.

It’s just not a setup for success.

(2) If by "unrelated to the check" you mean not an immediate causal consequence of the bodily motions performed in making the check, well OK. But that is a very specific meaning of "unrelated".

Haven’t you always understood that as the meaning though?

And this is where I find apparent double standards for conversation a bit frustrating. Are you setting out to state your preferences? Or to describe my RPGing? I don't really care which, but upthread you seemed to assert the first but here you're doing the second. And in that case, I assume that you are happy for me to describe yours.

In this thread it’s been asserted by you that your game isn’t about overcoming challenges, it’s about playing to find out (whatever that actually means is never going to be clear to me). But when those are the descriptions you give about your game, then I don’t think it’s hard see how that gets understood as ‘telling a story’. IMO if it’s a mistake by so many people introduced to these concepts then it’s a mistake of your own making and your own descriptions.

 

[Maxperson]

Though I have to point out its entirely possible to have had preferences that never aligned much with D&D that don't really align strongly with most narrativist games, either. I bailed out of D&D pretty early, but it was into other trad games that I still found quite satisfying (though the early tendency for everything to have random character gen was pretty tiresome).

What?! You didn't enjoy getting most of the way through making a Traveler character only to have it die before it was even finished being made?

@pemerton is that little gem in the more current versions?