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

[Lanefan]

When you adopt narrativist definitions of story as the only possible definition of story then sure.

When someone says their main goal is to play to find out then I think it’s fair to categorize that as playing to find out what happens next, which to me is about ‘story’.

Now you are right that what happens next is incidental in traditonsl play, but I’m not saying it’s my primary concern. The primary concern is to overcome obstacles.

I think the primary concern differs between players and DM.

The players' primary concern is to overcome whatever obstacle is in their way at the moment. The DM's primary concern is to think about both what happens next if they do overcome it and what happens next if they don't; i.e., how to narrate either outcome.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And they do?

4e is D&D. Objectively, it is. This isn't my decision. It's the decision of the people who are legally entitled to make things called "D&D".

If you don't like that, well, I'm sorry, your opinion is factually invalid. You can still have factually invalid opinions. Lots of people do.

The claim is particularly risible when 4e has far^100 more similarities to any other version of D&D than it does to any other TTRPG...except the ones consciously made by 4e creators or 4e fans trying to specifically emulate it.

But go off, bud. Tell me all the ways 4e is somehow an alien from Mars masquerading as D&D. Tell me how the opinions of all the people who loved the Fourth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons are all wrong, because other people think 4e cannot possibly be D&D.

You know it's ok for you to like 4e without feeling the need to defend it's D&D-ness. No one is arguing it's a bad game in anything beyond the "for me" sense.

 

[TwoSix]

That's not a very charitable way to phrase it. Better is "they prefer skills to be internal"--it doesn't assume your interlocuters are just misinformed.

It’s not charitable because it’s poor analysis to state your preferences as objective, as too many people are prone to do.

 

[AlViking]

Give me a good reason why people should be unhappy while playing a game.

Because if you never suffer the occasional setback the wins don't mean much.

 

[Enrahim]

Right; but here's what the blog says about hybridization:


"Rare in practice" doesn't square with "the most popular RPG", unless you assert that the majority of 5e games are only using a subset of the systems with a clearly defined creative agenda. Which is not my experience.

Ah, ok. Now I hope I read you correctly, as I think I read this as something I can whole-heartedly agree with.

The entire creative agenda thing is in my head almost untestable/unobservable as they have this concept of degrees of pursuing agendas. They hence sort of having a "get out of jail free" card where if you have a group where there isn't a very clear single creative agenda at play, they can claim players are just not pushing their agendas "hard" enough for it to be seen. In the hypotetical that they would have been pushing their agenda hard, then the game would either fall apart due to conflicting agendas, or harmonise in one direction.

This observation sound as basically human social nature at play. If each individual all are pushing something hard then they either need to conform or break. However it was under such circumstances it was observed that there appeared to be distinct recognizable categories of how people could conform, that matched boundaries between when it would break down. However I would think the sample size for these observations might have been relatively small. As mentioned in the blog post, one of the problems with understanding sim was the lack of recognized examples of groups really pushing it hard.

So we are taking observations done on extreme groups, and it seem like the expectation is that similar patterns also exists in the more scaled down groups. In particular that there is a market for specialized games also in this group that just isn't pushing their agenda so hard.

While my interpretation is that there is a strong correlation between having an agenda and pushing that agenda. That everyone that is pushing an agenda has it, is sort of self-evident. However might it be that the large population that isn't pushing their agenda hard is that they do not have a singular agenda to push?

 

[TwoSix]

"Rare in practice" doesn't square with "the most popular RPG", unless you assert that the majority of 5e games are only using a subset of the systems with a clearly defined creative agenda. Which is not my experience.

Contrast and compare 5e with the blog’s description of Call of Cthulhu.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Why do you have "nothing happens" there as an option in the first place?

Thinking back to the last few sessions I played in, I can't think of a single place where "nothing happens" was more logical than "something happens."

Again, because sometimes nothing happens. If you don't like that in your gaming, you are welcome to have something happen all the time.

 

[Lanefan]

If I said “this game will be set in Eberron”, as an example, would that be sufficient?

If you're running Eberron stock without too many tweaks and changes, then yes: there's enough setting material out there I can read (if I want to) to provide that sense of groundedness or permanence (still not sure of the right term for what I'm trying to express here) to feel like there's a solid foundation under whatever we're going to play through.

But if you say "This game will be set in Homebrewia" and then can't tell us a thing about it because the only thing you've nailed down so far is the name "Homebrewia" and you're planning to make the rest up as we go along, then it's almost certain to come across in play as ephemeral and, in the end, disposable. And while some might be cool with this, it would bug me to no end.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Give me a good reason why people should be unhappy while playing a game.

Because people like different things, and you're not going to always be able to satisfy everyone's fun simultaneously.

 

[TwoSix]

Good to hear this.

My question then becomes, what can the character do in the fiction to get things to the point where if he fails on his attempted task, all that happens is that he fails and nothing else.

Because if I'm playing that thief in character as someone who a) knows what he's doing and b) doesn't want to get caught, that no-risk state is exactly the condition I'm aspiring to achieve through all my pre-scouting and casing of the place. There's still no guarantee I'll be able to pick the lock - I won't know if I can until I actually try it - but if I fail I can bail with the least-possible risk of complication, and try a different approach.

You should probably play a game where a non-result is a valid result of a skill check.