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

[Lanefan]

Re: Bridge

I wouldn't know. I've never played it.

But whatever it is, it's not a game that is built on imagination. You don't take on a role while looking at your hand. The table isn't a magical land.

That it's not built on imagination has nothing to do with anything.

What matters here is that it's baked into the game design that someone has to sit out each hand, and every player fully knows this going in.

Why can't RPGs take the same tack and make it abundantly clear right up front that a) there's going to be times when you have to sit out for possibly quite some time and b) there's going to be times when the results of play will frustrate you.

Then, when the frustrating moments do occur, they're taken as being an accepted part of the game and nobody really bats an eye.

 

[pemerton]

It only sounds great because it is!

As I posted upthread, I've GMed 1000s of hours of Rolemaster, in the period 1990-2008 (inclusive). It was the game of choice for my university group (which endured well after we'd all graduated, and is still the kernel of my current group), and over that time we ran two long campaigns (1990-97; 1998-2008).

These days I am very conscious of the system's weaknesses, and I doubt that I will ever play or GM it again. Burning Wheel gives me the same intricacy of PC build, but a resolution framework that is just more robust for my purposes.

But for anyone wanting a serious sim-esque experience, of the classic "like D&D but realistic" variety, I think it's either RM or RQ; and while RQ is more elegant I personally think RM is more fun. The first time I played it was late Feb 1990, and it just blew me away - I went out, bought the boxed set and a couple of RM Companions, and started the first of my two campaigns a few weeks later.

 

[pemerton]

Guards are a possible complication but yes I would need more context to just drop a guard in. If it was a wall being climbed in an urban environment, perhaps being spotted by someone taking out the trash would be more reasonable. I dunno one would need more context on the location and persons normally in the area.

When it comes to the classic inspirational literature, my gold standard for climbing urban walls to sneak into somewhere important is REH's Tower of the Elephant. There are guards, and lions, and other guardian creatures.

Given the pace at which REH wrote, he must have been making most of this up simply as he went along! It's a good model of the sort of things a GM might aspire to dream up when GMing in a 'fail forward" style.

 

[Lanefan]

Oh, loss is fascinating. That's totally different then whiffing on a task and then standing around looking at each other.

If "standing around looking at each other" is what typically happens after a whiffed task then those players really need to learn how to react to failure by thinking outside the box and trying somethng different.

 

[SableWyvern]

In the system. As I keep saying, over and over again.

This isn't some situation exclusively applying to one single group's table.

It's the design of the system itself. Something everyone who uses that system has to accept, or go without playing at all.

That's literally what I've said from the very beginning.

Who is going to force you to use @FrogReaver's system against your will?

 

[Maxperson]

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

Uh uh. You have no ability to shove false words into our mouths. We are saying it's quantum because the player's die roll causes the cook to be there or not be there and we only find out after the box(die roll) is opened. Not because we're saying it's objectively wrong.

We do say that it's wrong for us. And we also have said over and over and over and over and over that neither method is better or worse, just different.

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.

D&D is not medieval Europe.

 

[SableWyvern]

As I posted upthread, I've GMed 1000s of hours of Rolemaster, in the period 1990-2008 (inclusive). It was the game of choice for my university group (which endured well after we'd all graduated, and is still the kernel of my current group), and over that time we ran two long campaigns (1990-97; 1998-2008).

These days I am very conscious of the system's weaknesses, and I doubt that I will ever play or GM it again. Burning Wheel gives me the same intricacy of PC build, but a resolution framework that is just more robust for my purposes.

But for anyone wanting a serious sim-esque experience, of the classic "like D&D but realistic" variety, I think it's either RM or RQ; and while RQ is more elegant I personally think RM is more fun. The first time I played it was late Feb 1990, and it just blew me away - I went out, bought the boxed set and a couple of RM Companions, and started the first of my two campaigns a few weeks later.

A while ago I saw someone on another forum comment that RM does the Forgotten Realms better than D&D. I have never had any interest in Forgotten Realms, but I've since discovered that the 1e Forgotten Realms is actually pretty cool, and I've been having a lot of fun adapting RM to run my next campaign there.

As to Runequest, Mythras is actually my rule system of choice for Dark Sun, Al Qadim and Planescape, so we're fairly closely aligned there, too.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I believe for many (me included) the association between climbing and falling down is so strong that that for us the obvious failure mode they can think of. Indeed to these your more realistic cut hand on a sharp rock might feel like you going soft on them.

That soft move would likely assign some mechanical penalties as well not just colour consequence. Particularly in a game like D&D where the primary language for most players is mechanics.

This is a serious problem in game design. If the majority of people has a misconception then you are in a bind. Either you do the realistic approach and seriously increase the bar to entry as you have to educate the audience, or you embrace the misconception, and alienates those that know the truth. I think it is quite obvious which is likely to be the most commercially viable alternative at least.

No. They've had 50 years, there is no excuse anymore. They have a website where they can dump basic advice for free and update wheresoever necessary. They advertised modular design we got next to nothing. Let's stop dumbing down our society.
I refuse to accept this premise because it's blatantly false and sets a low bar on poor misconceptions.

However in a group setting with one expert the solution isn't as obvious. Having that expert educate the others would likely be welcomed by them in a completely different manner than having it forced upon them by a textbook.

I'm not sure I understand you clearly here. Could you perhaps rephrase please.

So I would have liked some tricks and tools for how to identify such expert situations before an unrealistic outcome is narrated, and immersion break has already happened. It could for instance be something as simple as on a failure, check with players if they have any suggestions for outcomes. The idea would be that this would encourage any expert to speak up.

Yes. I love the bolded part because I have used it a handful of times and it works. You don't want to use it too much in a session because it may slow things down (one of the cons).

 

[clearstream]

@pemerton

One area that Eero Tuovinen really fails to grasp at when it comes to simulation (and I think this has been a general failure within our community but especially within the Forge) is not really grasping with the legacy of Pendragon, Ars Magica and Vampire. Particularly the way in which these games mechanics (rough as they were) helped to achieve a heightened understanding of characters' internal states. There's a legacy of embedding character mentality into the mechanics of the game to help us immerse into our characters those games brought to the table that inspired Narrativist designs, but never really got significant coverage from a theory standpoint.

I think from an agenda standpoint a large part of why I like the Narrativist games I like has to do with their adjacency to simulation of character mentality. Like the basic moves in Apocalypse World, Apocalypse Keys and Monsterhearts directly embed the same sort of modeling of character psychology we see in Vampire - The Requiem and Pendragon. I think that as much as the crucible model (even perhaps more than the crucible model) is really drove me to invest in those games.

I found this an enlightening post. Where if anywhere, do you then locate differences?

Does narrativism wind up being a subset of simulationism? Simulationism in the dramatic mode, so to speak?

 

[Lanefan]

Is there? You've never made room for such a distinction before. Why is it suddenly relevant now?

Because this is the first time I realized I needed to make the distinction.

And would you seriously not think that something was wrong if you were " 'winning all the time' because of what [you]'ve done as a good player"? I'm pretty sure you'd find that, as the kids say, pretty sus.

Further...I find this whole thing really confusing in light of your previous commitment to "gambling". Now you're saying it is a game of skill, one where the player should be able to completely obviate randomness. So...which is it? Is it fundamentally a gamble, where skill simply cannot be enough (as you have said to me before, albeit in different words), or is it fundamentally a game of skill, where randomness can be progressively pushed away until it's gone?

Both. It's a gamble where I-as-player have a variable-by-situation degree of control over the odds I'm facing.

...because the game does reward it, but usually not in direct mechanical terms unless some kind of move has been made, and most moves require a roll. Not all, but certainly the vast majority.

DW tends to avoid mechanical rewards of that kind, unless produced by a move, and instead favors returning to the fiction with instruction to the GM that the state should evolve in favorable ways, so long as they make sense. So, for example, if a player has played a mansion-infiltration, and as part of doing that romanced a servant-girl (again, stealing from Sherlock Holmes here) to get insider information or access, I might not necessarily ask for any roll--if their wooing seems like it should just work, then it does, and they get the information or access they desire. The "complication" for such an act is that now this character has built up a relationship with an NPC who won't take kindly to merely being used and dropped, which could potentially come back to bite that character in the butt, should circumstances warrant it.

I'd handle this situation vastly differently, ideally roleplayed in detail enough to allow for far more possible outcome options:

--- the wooing works as intended and the information is gained
--- the wooing part works as intended but inaccurate or incomplete information is gained
--- the wooing appears to work as intended, the information is gained but she rats him out at the first opportunity
--- the wooing goes nowhere because she's not into guys, or just doesn't like him, or doesn't trust him
--- the wooing may or may not succeed in itself but he blew his cover, and now has to resort to bribery or other means of getting info
--- the wooing leads to a diversion in, or new branch of, the story e.g. he has to do something for her before she'll tell him anything

Needless to say (or at least I hope it's needless) these outcomes would have different probabilities of occurring and would greatly depend on how the roleplay part of it went.

Afterwards, I'd think about the possibility of downstream consequences such as - among others - the bolded; and may or may not bring any to bear dependent, again, on situation.