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

[zakael19]

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.​

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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. . . .​

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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.

Some expanded thoughts on stuff:

First: One thing that's kinda interesting to me is that from my little perspective over here a lot of the arguing respectful discussion in this thread is between conservatives of very different preferences around styles and systems of play. For instance, BW and the way it's structured is like, old, from a narrativist design perspective. You in particular are reaching back to the earliest days of TTRPGs on a personal level quite frequently in a way that 0 people I interact with elsewhere do (mostly because most of us weren't alive and as I noted earlier in this thread dont really give a F about Gygax; I didn't know who he was until ~3-4 years ago and didnt really know much about early D&D etc until last year when I read The Elusive Shift). The sort of "character crucible" play some folks here enjoy I legit really don't see that much elsewhere in the communities around PBTA/FITD, and seems to be largely best exemplified by some early PBTAs like Monsterhearts and Masks that are as far as I can tell intentionally designed around "putting your character(s) through emotional hell and seeing what happens." (I do not, personally, think that AW is nearly as much that as designed - and the expanded future/what you make of the world bits you get in the iterations culminated with AW:BO make this much more clear and intentional).

Second: So that being said, stuff like what Egri wrote there is interesting but also pretty dang insulting in the way it's worded, right? Also, I'm not sure we gain anything by rehashing the old GNS style crap that was never that good to start with.

What I'd say instead is that throughout all of human history there's an interest in heroics as adjudged by the culture at hand (although certain themes do tend to run through). We've always been engaged by stories about heroes, because quite often the world is Crap; and it's cool to have the idea that people can like fight that back in a bit of a wish fulfillment way. (some argument here wrt cultures and this being a very Western thing as well)

TTRPGs obviously offered that idea from the start, particularly the free-form roleplayers bringing their culture in that was already pursuing that sort of thing. Combine that with the increase in diversity within the hobby over the last few decades, along with a lot of said diversity and younger generations watching their world just seemingly inexorably slide down to crush them (I have a lot of queer players, and they absolutely are interesting in certain themes of hope despite adversity- you see this in a lot of games from queer designers as well), and you can see why "complex heroic stories where we get to pretend we can make a difference, be accepting, and have a good time" have largely become teh dominant style of play. Critical Role and Dimension 20 really opened the aperture there to a huge crowd of new fans of that sort of thing, so I think it's natural that we see games which are now seeking to recreate via design the sort of themes those programs engage with. Not new, but more intentional now.

Third: Yes, DH is directly aimed at fusing that last paragraph of bad wording form your quote. "GM fronted cinematic story beats" with "deep character-play" with some degree of "hold on loosely and play to find out."

Lots of PBTAs are doing this as well (DW2 in particular is trying) to some degree, although most still eschew the first bit.

 

[FrogReaver]

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.

It’s funny because I like 4e! If my group would have been interested we would have given it a go in 2024 but they weren’t.

But I have a greater appreciation now of why it didn’t click for everyone.

 

[The Firebird]

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.

Agree.

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.

Agree, that it seems like they started with their preferences and then tried to universalize.

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?

Ime the majority of players have multiple agendas they are pushing simultaneously. The majority of D&D players at least are engaging in Gamism when they want to optimize and make the right choices in combat and engage in simulationism when they perform Princess Play or listen to GM Story Hour. Narrative elements are less common but not rare ime, and multiple GMs have told me "I like narrative games because they systematize how I was running D&D anyway".

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

Which they call incoherent--I assume they would say something similar about 5e.

 

[TwoSix]

Second: So that being said, stuff like what Egri wrote there is interesting but also pretty dang insulting in the way it's worded, right? Also, I'm not sure we gain anything by rehashing the old GNS style crap that was never that good to start with.

Like most taxonomies, GNS is terrible right up until you try and create a replacement.

And I'm probably callused, but I didn't read anything in that post that seemed remotely insulting.

 

[TwoSix]

Which they call incoherent--I assume they would say something similar about 5e.

Well, yea! 5e IS wildly incoherent, that's why people fight about it all the time on this and many other sites. And I say that as someone who's been playing and running 5e as my main game for 11 years.

 

[Lanefan]

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

Other than forcing the players to think, which IMO is a good thing.

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

Getting what I want all the time would become boring within the first session. Constant motion also becomes boring after a while - it's the whole highs and lows thing again; sometimes things move quickly, sometimes they don't move at all, and most of the time they move at whatever pace they're going to move at.

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.

Huh. For me it actually makes it easier to improvise if-when I have to*, as I've become more familiar with the material.

* - ideally minimized by having dealt with the more obvious 'what-if's in the module itself; it's perhaps my main criticism of most published modules, that they don't cover the obvious what-ifs and leave the DM hanging.

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?

Not everyone has to be 100% happy 100% of the time.

Also, I'm not talking here about what was a one-time experience out of 43 years of play; I'm talking about the much more fleeting frustration of failure at a task (such as picking a lock) rendering you unable to move forward until-unless you come up with and implement a plan B (which itself might not work). Even this seems unacceptable to you, and I just don't get it.

It's like saying there should never be dead-end passages in a dungeon.

 

[The Firebird]

Like most taxonomies, GNS is terrible right up until you try and create a replacement.

And I'm probably callused, but I didn't read anything in that post that seemed remotely insulting.

"storygames versus traditional versus OSR" seems simpler and more effective in practice. Less ambitious taxonomies like "rules-light versus "rules-heavy", "fluff versus crunch", or (to throw a bone to the Forge) Stance theory all codify parts of RPGs quite well. It's easy to know what we mean by these and there aren't as many disputes about what is what.

 

[zakael19]

Like most taxonomies, GNS is terrible right up until you try and create a replacement.

And I'm probably callused, but I didn't read anything in that post that seemed remotely insulting.

Look, if you have to start your post out with “I mean nothing insulting with what I’m about to say” you probably could’ve done something different. He could’ve left it at “childhood make believe” instead of picking a deliberately provocative way to word things as seemed to be common in that culture during the early forge period.

I’m glad we’ve moved beyond that nonsense, and most of the people involved have more thoughtful and interesting things to say from 1-2 decades later, even if there’s nuggets back there that are still interesting (I generally paraphrase things because I don’t feel the need to quote entire blocks, and can distill the essence).

 

[The Firebird]

Well, yea! 5e IS wildly incoherent, that's why people fight about it all the time on this and many other sites. And I say that as someone who's been playing and running 5e as my main game for 11 years.

I think that has more to do with the popularity of the game and the nature of RPGs than any particular incoherence of 5e design.

 

[zakael19]

"storygames versus traditional versus OSR" seems simpler and more effective in practice. Less ambitious taxonomies like "rules-light versus "rules-heavy", "fluff versus crunch", or (to throw a bone to the Forge) Stance theory all codify parts of RPGs quite well. It's easy to know what we mean by these and there aren't as many disputes about what is what.

“Storygames” is terrible and doesn’t say anything and is implicitly dismissive in the way “hardcore gamers” derided video games like Gone Home as “walking simulators.”