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

[The Firebird]

Speaking of which, I did find this - from the introduction to the blog - interesting:

You’re reading a rpg theory article about a rather specialized topic; even if you’ve played roleplaying games for years, it’s possible that the ideas and concerns expressed in this article are things you have never yet considered yourself. “RPG theory” is a form of art theory, an attempt by practitioners of roleplaying to understand, verbalize and model what happens during the activity. Although roleplaying is a pretty young art form, it already has let’s say three or four distinct schools of theory, and a bevy of specialized vocabulary. RPG theory is useful for hardcore hobbyists, but it takes as much study as any other art theory to get any insights, and those insights are generally of a sort only useful for veteran practitioners. Theory is something you move on to when you’ve exhausted the immediate development potential in your everyday play and want to develop your skills and understanding further. If you’re happy with your gaming, I propose that the time for RPG theory is not yet; come back to it when you’ve grown dissatisfied and are seeking solutions.​

​

My specific RPG theory topic here goes back to the early ’00s; I’ll be restating and commenting upon a few parts of an influential rpg theory scheme called the GNS theory. .. . . This Ron Edwards fellow whose work I’ll be commenting on here is Ron Edwards, my rpg guru, a powerful game designer and the single most important theorist in the history of rpgs. You could do much worse than studying his work. Ron currently works out of Adept Play, a sort of combined blog-forum thing. I haven’t followed his work in real-time recently (I am frankly a bit intimidated by Ron, and don’t want to be a pest), but I have no doubt whatsoever that you’re making a grave mistake by reading my stuff instead of his.​

That last sentence is disarmingly modest! But as a whole this framing is pleasingly honest. It's not an "I like what I like" essay.

Really? I found the combination of "you have to be of a certain level of skill to understand this" and "my rpg guru, a powerful game designer, and the single most important theorist in the history of rpgs" to be hagiographic. It's a false modesty.

 

[Yaarel]

It's certainly worth it to read the entire blog post. It engages with precisely these points.

Summarize?

 

[Faolyn]

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).

Since we're talking about fail forward, that's not an option.

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.

We've explained this: it's not interesting or fun. It does nothing but stall the game. It accomplishes nothing useful.

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.

But does a little but of frustration actually make the game better? Or is it just what you're used to?

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.

Not an answer. For me, reading it over and over again, hoping to catch mistakes, just locks me more and more into a single way to run the adventure and makes me less able to improvise when the players go their own way.

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

Or it can lead to anger or boredom. Was everyone having fun in those two and a half sessions? Was everyone happy to see that they repeatedly failed to solve what you called a simple puzzle?

 

[FrogReaver]

What do you mean? I haven't argued against examples - the only example offered was by me, and @Erahim told me that I was wrong.

So I'm asking if there is an example. I mean, do you have one in mind? If not, what do you think the point of the category is?

Let’s try it this way. Every game that does what I described, placing both internal to character and external to character things as part of the same skill check are doing the entangling. That’s pretty much every narrativist game I’ve ever seen described by you.

Yes the game doesn’t define skill checks to be internal to character only, but that doesn’t matter. The entanglement is there regardless of the games definition of skills. It’s only a problem when one has entanglement + a premise that skill checks either are or ought to be about internal to character things.

 

[AlViking]

More to the point, how often do bears wander into locked kitchens in the middle of the night?

More often than you might think

 

[FrogReaver]

And?

@AlViking asked how fail forward could be done in D&D. I provided a pretty straightforward example.

Given that some people seem to think that skill challenges can be done in 5e D&D, presumably that shows how "fail forward" could be done in 5e as well.

And now you know why many people don’t view 4e d&d as real d&d.

You know this though, which is why I don’t understand why you bring 4e D&d into it.

 

[pemerton]

A bit more from Tuovinen that seems relevant to this thread:

the term “princess play” is not intended to be disparaging. I do not think that playing princess is a shameful activity. If you do, you might need help, because you’re criticizing a very common childhood game. The name comes, of course, from the common role-adoption game that children like to play, which I believe to present a creative agenda that is essentially similar to the enjoyment a roleplayer gets from a role meaningful to them. That is, it is exciting to pretend to be a princess or a fireman or rock star or astronaut or whatnot because you get to pretend to engage in exciting activities and be treated differently from usual.

Simmy games that particularly rely on princess play as entertainment usually encourage players to develop their characters quite freely, and often offer very empowering character roles. The ideal princess play game will feature a wide variety of appropriate situations where the player gets to “act out” the role, with the other players offering affirmative reactions and feedback that make the role feel more real. The veritable philosopher’s stone for princess play games is the question of how to get players to rely on each other as interactive companions; the history of the traditional roleplaying game is a history of adventuring parties; there is a clear desire for inter-party role-affirming play (the dwarf and elf should both want to bicker to affirm their roles as the dwarf and the elf), but how do you actually get the players to do the legwork in a foundationally passive rpg culture? It’s a conundrum. . . .

Probably the most archetypal Sim roleplaying game is created by combining GM story hour with princess play: the GM’s task is to bring an exciting story (a series of scenes with content, that is; having a plot is technically speaking just a stylistic issue), while the players’ job is for each to create a character inherently exciting to play. Fun is had when the GM gets to put out their play, and the players get to enjoy playing a role emotionally meaningful to them in the GM’s story. Success requires understanding how both the GM story hour and princess play work as core activities, so the game can be structured in a way that makes justice to both. Definitely possible.​

This seems to be what 5e aspires to, at least based on some of the core elements of its rulebooks. I'm curious about DaggerHeart in this context too - calling @Campbell and @zakael19.

I think the boundary between "princess play" and character-oriented "narrativism" can be a thin one: it's a small move from being the exciting role to wondering about the exciting role. @Campbell, I'd love to hear any thoughts you have on this given your experience with both sides of that boundary.

 

[Yaarel]

Could it be there’s more than one way to be immersed. Call it simulationist immersion and narrativist immersion. I think it’s fairly clear different things immerse each of us, but there do seem to be some oft repeated themes.

Narrativism includes the phenomenon of narrative immersion.

Game mechanics, by themselves, are too simplistic to paint the details that immersion requires, including the immersive interactivity when players spontaneously describe how they interact with the details of a scene. Mechanics, nevermind game mechanics, can never anticipate all of the possibilities that players might instigate. Too many possibilities can only be resolved by narrative adjudication without referencing mechanics directly.

If one forces players to limit every interaction to an assemblage of certain mechanics, that limitation itself dispels narrative immersion.

Simulationism is strictly mechanical, like writing code for a computer game. For a table top, its complexity and predeterminism forces tension against both gamist simplicity and narrativist possibilities.


In D&D, I care about both (gamist) mechanics and (narrativist) flavor. The best I can hope for is that they "cohere". It means that the mechanics and the flavor never contradict each other. If the flavor asserts a fact within the game world, the mechanics must reasonably substantiate it. And viceversa, if the mechanics defacto cause certain behaviors within the game world, the flavor must reasonably account for it.

Simulationism would try to match mechanics and flavor perfectly, but that is beyond the scope of a table top game.

 

[pemerton]

It's quite a while since I read the Iron Crown/Rolemaster forums. But back when I used to, it was interesting to see that most of the posters were playing games structurally indistinguishable from mainstream AD&D 2nd ed play - the difference that RM made was simply that they liked its colour better, mostly because they found it more realistic and the characters more vibrant.

I think this is fairly consistent with what Tuovinen says.

 

[TwoSix]

Summarize?

I'd really rather not. It engages with a LOT of topics, and I would almost assuredly not get across a lot of the important context.