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

[Lanefan]

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.

Sure, this is fine (though personally I'd include a small % chance the Ogre is at neither location but is in transit between the two or is somewhere else entirely).

It's the pre-establishment of those 75-25 odds that matters; you've given the Ogre a couple of logical places to be and assigned odds to each one. Good prep. Personally, I'd say the best time for the DM to roll for its current location is just before the PCs and-or the Ogre could first potentially become aware of each other's presence, if it does turn out to be on the path they're taking.

 

[Lanefan]

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

It was.

Frustration can, however, sometimes also be and-or lead to good fun.

 

[Lanefan]

Sure, OK--but do you think that's the case for everyone? The adventures I write have contradictory or missing points because I don't write them in one go, and forgot points in between writing sessions.

If I write an adventure out fully, it's done well in advance of anyone playing it and I read it over and over again in hopes of catching those contradictions and omissions.

Or because the characters are doing something at this point in my notes and I forgot I wrote something important or useful about it elsewhere.

I find that to be more an issue when running a published module; as if I wrote it I've in theory got the advantage of remembering what goes with what. That said, I'm certainly not immune to making mistakes; I just make less of them than I used to, and try my best to continue that downward trend.

 

[Xetheral]

The idea is just to not have "nothing happen". That's all. Is that really a bad idea? And, let's say that you decide that the best thing that could happen in the case of the thief at the door is that the door remains locked and he has to figure something else out? Okay, fine... go ahead and do that! That just means that you didn't use Fail Forward in this instance. It doesn't mean you never could or should.

The outright rejection of the idea is the exhausting bit. Unless everyone here truly believes that the only thing that should ever happen on a failed roll is "nothing happens"... which I highly doubt.

In the abstract, avoiding having "nothing happen" is a good thing because it has the decided benefit of helping prevent play bogging down.

Game mechanics and/or GMing techniques that prevent a "nothing happens" outcome, however, do work at cross purposes with the players' in-character efforts (if any) at risk-mitigation. Specifically, players trying to maximize the chances of their characters succeeding at their longer-term goals have an incentive to try to limit the potential in-fiction consequences of any risky actions they elect to take along the way--in other words, such players are actively trying to drive the downside risks as close as possible to "nothing happens." That doesn't (or possibly can't) play nicely with game mechanics and GMing techniques that seek to prevent that outcome.

Of course, in those games where setting longer-term goals and strategizing to maximize the odds of achieving those goals isn't a part of play, this tension is irrelevant (assuming everyone is on board with the goals of play, anyway!) But it's definitely a part of play at some traditional tables. And I would suggest that goal setting and strategizing (and the resulting player efforts at risk mitigation) is a defining part of play in some styles of sandbox campaigns.

From my perspective it would seem to be a rational choice for any GM to "outright reject" any technique that works at cross-purposes to a defining part of play at their table. Would you agree? If so, it would seem to me that GMs whose campaigns are defined by longer-term PC goal setting, strategizing, and attendant efforts at risk mitigation are making a rational choice to categorically avoid techniques that prevent "nothing happens" outcomes, and to instead find some other method of avoiding play bogging down.

At a higher level of generality, it's reasonable when playing a game with well-definied purposes of play to reject using incompatible GMing techniques, yes? Traditional games don't have such clear-cut or uniform purposes of play, but each individual campaign presumably has some (hard to categorize though they might be), and it would seem to me to be equally reasonable for each such campaign's GM to also reject incompatible GMing techniques.

I would suggest that GMs who reject allegedly incompatible techniques may simply know their campaigns well enough to be making an informed choice, rather than engaging in reflexive conservativism, even if the difficulty of analyzing the diverse playstyles that make up "traditional" campaigns makes it challenging to tell the one from the other.

 

[Lanefan]

This, of course, heavily depends on the game and what sort of abilities the PCs have, but let's say that through whatever those abilities are, they're positive that nobody is awake in that house. So now there are two options:

Option A is to have them just break in, no roll necessary.

Option B is to have them roll, because there are outside forces--a neighbor's dog, an alarm spell--that could still affect things.

What about Option C, which is to have them roll because if they fail they don't get what they want (in this case, that'd be entry to the house).

It really depends on how interesting it is, whether the roll would move things along or cause things to stop.

This is what I just don't get: this incredible degree of objection to having the characters get stuck in place for even just a moment.

Things don't stop just because they can't open the door (well, unless you have the least creative players ever, in which case it might be time for new players). They just have to think of, and then try, another approach. And sure, they might be a bit frustrated in the moment, but a bit of frustration now and then is not a bad thing! Let it happen.

 

[Lanefan]

To be fair, in most games which rely heavily on success with complications generally rolls should only be called for when the complications would call for "heck in a handbasket".

My issue with that is that whenever heck in a handbasket isn't on the table the players always auto-succeed and get what they want. I want the far-more-realistic situation to be in play that there's no added complication, but they still can't get what they want; which is the very point of a "nothing happens" fail roll.

I'm also struggling a lot with the idea that finding someone in the house you're breaking into is "random-ass crap". That doesn't seem random at all! It seems pretty darn connected to what's going on in the fiction.

Even if-when the character has taken steps to determine there's nobody in the room being broken into? That the reason the character chose the kitchen as the point of access is because he knows there's nobody there at night?

 

[FrogReaver]

I think it is important to understand why a result "feeling unrelated to" the check is a really bad thing in a certain style of play.

First, I am going to assume we are here talking about the weirdly entangled resolution style (7) as described in my taxonomy of quantum D&D General - [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

This resolution style is for course unproblematic if pursuing a nartivistic agenda - indeed it has some very nice properties allowing narrative to be formed around what the themes players find interesting enough to engage in.

Yep! There's alot of pros to the techniques, even for use outside a purely narrativistic agenda there's a good set of pros for many of the techniques. But as you go on to describe there's also a big cost.

I think a problem here is that for those that feels that this is a bit off the obvious way to formulate their concern is in a gamist way - that the entanglement break agency as it muddles what the consequences of an action could be. However this is not a fundamental issue with the process. As most games lay out the mechanism in play it is fully possible to reason around it for someone entering the with the right mindset and experience. I think this is where quite a bit of the accusations about ""conservatism" come from.

I'm not as sure about your entangled resolution style (7) in this context but I think there's a legitimate gamist issue when applying the typical implementations of Fail Forward to a game about overcoming obstacles - i think recently we reached a fairly large consensus on that - not unanimous but it's the internet

I do agree that its a minor issue compared to the simulationist one.

I believe the big issue with this approach lies on a metaphysical level that is very hard to both recognise and express. This is more similutionistic in nature. It is about how for players has the concept of a paralell fantasy world with a sort of "existence" outside of ours are central to their core enjoyment of the game.

When tolkien enthusiasts try to reason around what could have happened with the blue mages, they are (normally) not trying to make up anything as dramatic as possible. They are trying to use what is known to deduce what they think would have happened as if something actually did happen with them in this fictional space. I presume everyone involved in such activities are very aware they are talking about a fictional setting, and I guess most assume Tolkien himself had not settled on an answer to this. So we are talking about people exploring a fictional space that is in one way not in anyones head, but still is atributed a sort of independent "existence"

In TTRPG we allow ourselves to go visit one of these fictional worlds trough "inhabiting" one of the creatures in that world. We get to see trough their eyes, and to some extent control their actions. This is an inteference of our world with the fictional world that I believe all TTRPG players accept. But note I stated the player controls the character to some extent. In many groups, If a player has a character behave in a way that is inconsistent with what that character is believed to be in this seperate fictional world, that is a foul. That is the player overreaching their divine duties to not interfer directly with what is happening in this fantasy world. They are bringing aspects of the real world (player actions) into the fantasy world in a too overt maner, hence tainting the experience.

And this lead me to the critisism against the weirdly entangled quantum that I do not think can be easily brushed off as conservatism or misunderstanding the entire deal: This is clearly a more overt case of something happening in the real world affecting the fictional space, than a player acting a bit out of character. Indeed it is so bad it is seriously threatening the entire integrity of the fantasy as having any sort of independence from the group that is playing.

It might be argued that this entire independence is an illusion, and that might be right. But that is completely missing the point, and might even be a bit cruel. For many this illusion is essential to what they find enjoyable with the activity.

Exactly, though maybe a bit more poetic and less concrete.

We've created an actual simulation not just an illusion. It's not a perfect simulation, but still a simulation. The concrete issue is that the wierdly entangled resolution method undermines the simulation when it becomes too central to the resolution framework. Why does it inherently do this? Because entangling unrelated things together is not how simulations work!

 

[FrogReaver]

What about Option C, which is to have them roll because if they fail they don't get what they want (in this case, that'd be entry to the house).

This is what I just don't get: this incredible degree of objection to having the characters get stuck in place for even just a moment.

Things don't stop just because they can't open the door (well, unless you have the least creative players ever, in which case it might be time for new players). They just have to think of, and then try, another approach. And sure, they might be a bit frustrated in the moment, but a bit of frustration now and then is not a bad thing! Let it happen.

One might could even say - the occasional frustration makes victory that much sweeter!

 

[Xetheral]

We've created an actual simulation not just an illusion. It's not a perfect simulation, but still a simulation. The concrete issue is that the wierdly entangled resolution method undermines the simulation when it becomes too central to the resolution framework. Why does it inherently do this? Because entangling unrelated things together is not how simulations work!

It's overly simplistic, but I'm nevertheless a fan of the general principle in modeling that similar things should be modeled similarly and different things should be modeled differently. That way the imprecision inherent in any model is less likely to map similar inputs to wildly different outputs, or vice versa.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure. But there you had the choice and embraced it. Clearly that is different from discovering that the BBEG had finished his plan half an hour ago, to reference the classic Watchmen scene.

I was going to say. Not a fan of Watchmen? Personally I loved that they did that.