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

[zakael19]

Unless, of course, these games expect us to play our characters as idiots; I earnestly hope that's not the case.

Hey, I don’t spend 3 sessions with my players bashing their heads against a puzzle .

And again, you’re doing the least interesting or charitable interpretation. You’ve been told multiple times that a competent character will not be facing a locked door in a vacuum and told “roll or fail.” If we get to that point, there’s something else there, or all the other work you did to get inside was the real obstacle and now we’re on to new more interesting things.

Most games that bake some version of “fail forward” in are not testing task resolution.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Why do you care if 4e didn't feel like D&D to them? It was certainly a pretty radical departure of design from what came before and after.

They don't. They care about what it says on the cover and that's all, as far as I can tell.

 

[zakael19]

Shouldn't teaching also include how to deal with failure?

Failing a dice roll doesn’t teach anything.

If you say “it’s cool that TTRPG can teach or enhance lateral thinking” I’m with you. If you want to say they can do all sorts of cool stuff around collaboration and imagination, totally. There’s burgeoning fields of TTTRPG as therapeutic tools, one of my players last year was studying that in an academic setting.


Edit: in fact “fail forward” games taught me to embrace complication and things going sideways in entertainment because it’s not miserable to play out!

 

[Eric V]

Not true. Cooperative games exist. TTRPGs are largely held to be an excellent example of those. In fact, pretty much every TTRPG rule book I’ve read over the last decade has said it’s not a game where you have winners and losers.

So, this is completely true, not arguing this point...

...but the response to it (and a few others afterwards, about educating players and such) really shows how the viewpoint difference is pretty huge. It seems there's an aspect of the aforementioned conservatism that feels it's necessary to have loss conditions that are more penalizing than fun (ranging from the one-roll fall from the cliff to the "nothing happens at all" result of a skill check); that having a player have to sit out and do nothing because of a bad roll is just the breaks, whattya gonna do?

Maybe this is why any discussion of fail-forward, or PC contribution to the world in non-classic ways is just not going to fly. Modern assumptions are that there are no losers in TTRPGs, but the player of the paladin who falls to his death from one roll; the group that discovers they never had a chance to save the princess (ala Watchmen)...they're gonna feel like they lost.

 

[AlViking]

Failing a dice roll doesn’t teach anything.

If you say “it’s cool that TTRPG can teach or enhance lateral thinking” I’m with you. If you want to say they can do all sorts of cool stuff around collaboration and imagination, totally. There’s burgeoning fields of TTTRPG as therapeutic tools, one of my players last year was studying that in an academic setting.


Edit: in fact “fail forward” games taught me to embrace complication and things going sideways in entertainment because it’s not miserable to play out!

It's not about failing the dice roll, it's about how to deal with the fact that you fail sometimes because we all fail sometimes. Do you get upset or just accept failure, figure out what went wrong and try a different approach?

In any case I'm not going to argue about it I just don't see the issue being failure, it's how you deal with failure. If you never fail we might as well be handing out participation trophies.

 

[zakael19]

...but the response to it (and a few others afterwards, about educating players and such) really shows how the viewpoint difference is pretty huge. It seems there's an aspect of the aforementioned conservatism that feels it's necessary to have loss conditions that are more penalizing than fun (ranging from the one-roll fall from the cliff to the "nothing happens at all" result of a skill check); that having a player have to sit out and do nothing because of a bad roll is just the breaks, whattya gonna do?

Maybe this is why any discussion of fail-forward, or PC contribution to the world in non-classic ways is just not going to fly. Modern assumptions are that there are no losers in TTRPGs, but the player of the paladin who falls to his death from one roll; the group that discovers they never had a chance to save the princess (ala Watchmen)...they're gonna feel like they lost.

It's table culture priorities, right? Like we have games now that make PC Death an inherently consent-based mechanic (and I say "now" when I'm pretty sure @pemerton has pointed at some pretty old games that did that as well, as does AW).

Like pretty much everything @Lanefan posts about their play sounds absolutely miserable and ancient to me (literally like the stuff I was doing with a group when I was in my early teens), but clearly it's working for them and their group since they've been doing it for decades apparently.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So, this is completely true, not arguing this point...

...but the response to it (and a few others afterwards, about educating players and such) really shows how the viewpoint difference is pretty huge. It seems there's an aspect of the aforementioned conservatism that feels it's necessary to have loss conditions that are more penalizing than fun (ranging from the one-roll fall from the cliff to the "nothing happens at all" result of a skill check); that having a player have to sit out and do nothing because of a bad roll is just the breaks, whattya gonna do?

Maybe this is why any discussion of fail-forward, or PC contribution to the world in non-classic ways is just not going to fly. Modern assumptions are that there are no losers in TTRPGs, but the player of the paladin who falls to his death from one roll; the group that discovers they never had a chance to save the princess (ala Watchmen)...they're gonna feel like they lost.

I honestly prefer games where it's possible to lose. I told a story about a recent campaign that ended with a definite personal loss, and it was amazing!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

For literally at least the dozenth time, nobody is saying that other variations are wrong.

Sure. LOTS of cook are up at midnight to 2am sitting around the kitchen after cooking dinner and before getting up at 4am to get ready to make breakfast. They're doing that constantly.

No, you all just call it a 'quantum cook', I mean come on! Of course you're saying it's wrong!

As for who is up at what time, I think you make a lot of assumptions about things based on modern notions. If we're going by medieval European norms the kitchen staff sleeps in the kitchen, tends the fire all night, and may well be processing food at all hours. I'm no authority on medieval domestic life but I know enough to not think I can gauge these things, so dice are a decent fallback.

 

[Yaarel]

The assertion that simulationism is strictly mechanical doesn't seem right to me, although I understand the tradition that informs it. If Tuovinen is roughly right then the aims of simulationism can be achieved without necessitating a "strictly mechanical" game with "complexity and predeterminism". FKR advocates furnished with their invisible rulebooks seem to testify to a less strictly mechanical pathway to an elevated appreciation of subject.

I am unfamiliar with "FKR", it would help to summarize the point while referring to it. Judging from a google to this Reddit, it seems FKR is a reinvention of a pre-D&D wargame, "Free Kriegsspiel Revolution". Heh, I dont think I as a ENWorld forumer in the 2020s should have been expected to be familiar with this.

(reddit .com/r/rpg/comments/lvcjqz/a_brief_introduction_to_the_emerging_fkr_free/)

In any case, what the Reddit describes for this "FKR" seems more like the opposite of "simulationism". Indeed, it is exactly narrativist (DM narrative adjudication) with minimalist gamist mechanics (opposing 2d6), that requires "trusting the DM" rather than relying on sophisticated mechanical outcomes.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Wrong for the person, not wrong in general. Why are you so "exhausted" by dealing with people who don't like what you like?

I get criticized any time I say something similar.