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

[Enrahim]

Deleted, as I realise it is irrelevant.

 

[AlViking]

I don’t know. “Unconnected” seems pretty clear. And I would say all the consequences are clearly connected to the actions.

How? @AnotherGuy literally told me there was no in-world connection with his example. It was only connected by the GM choosing something to happen because the player failed a roll. So who am I to believe? You or the person who provided an example and explained that there was no in-world causation? Other examples have been "since you failed to pick the lock someone notices you". In order to make it "improve" it, it's just not a chef in the kitchen.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I'm not sure that you have to ditch the idea of metagaming. You just have to be a bit more generous in your descriptions so there's less hidden info. Let the PCs hear noises through the door without a perception-type check--which narrative-type games usually don't have anyway. That there's a cook in the kitchen probably shouldn't be hidden info anyway.

Unless that's what you meant by metagaming in this context.

It’s part of it, yes. But I also find that you just don’t need to worry all that much about separating what the players know from what the characters know. And in the few cases where maybe that does matter, I’ll play the card many others like to play… trust,

Just trust your players not to be weasels.

"Optimizing the fiction" to shape the outcome range is definitely part of what I see as fiction-first gameplay, for the games that bring that sort of thing in. Blades codifies this well in the Position conversation.

But I dont think you ever intentionally and consistently hit the sort of "ok, with how you've set up the problem set no rolls are necessary here" of like OSR dungeon play. The rules and procedures and player guidance of most narrativist games are about injecting the unwanted and seeing what happens to build complex and compelling situations.

I think it is less common because it is bot as much a focus of play… but I have absolutely mitigated an obstacle or threat through clever action declaration and or use of character abilities before. @Manbearcat in particular would often rule that an action would no libger be needed because I used X ability or had evoked Y bit of fiction.

PBTAs, FITD, Daggerheart, etc all advise the creation and maintenance of a "metachannel" at all times during play - rising and falling in and out of character to discuss procedures, check in on each other, validate the fiction, talk through framing, before falling back down into character view.

Most of these games also just dont have any of the classic "I'm using genre design conventions to guess at stuff" problems IMO.

The only bit of like, intentional "metagaming" I see people taking steps to avoid at my tables is when we have separate scenes going and somebody is in urgent danger and other characters can't know that.

This is more what I’m talking about… the metachannel. Recognizing it as not just a useful Part of play, but vital part. Inform the players as well as the characters. When you’re not making any rolls, it’s best to let them know what their roll represents… including NPC actions or similar.

Treating the metachannel as verboten is, I think, a huge mistake for more narrativist games.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don’t know. “Unconnected” seems pretty clear. And I would say all the consequences are clearly connected to the actions.

Unconnected by any metric the poster in question values. As it turns out you have different standards.

 

[AlViking]

It’s very clearly stated that the guard heard the singing and came to see what was going on,

If the guard showed up because they overheard singing, they should have shown up whether the check was successful or not. You can't have it both ways. Either the guard was bound to show up regardless of the result of the check or the guard showed up because the check failed. If it's the latter then the guard only showed up because the game rules tell the GM to introduce a complication.

If I recall correctly @pemerton clarified somewhere that the guard did not show up because their character was overheard.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

PBTAs, FITD, Daggerheart, etc all advise the creation and maintenance of a "metachannel" at all times during play - rising and falling in and out of character to discuss procedures, check in on each other, validate the fiction, talk through framing, before falling back down into character view.

Most of these games also just dont have any of the classic "I'm using genre design conventions to guess at stuff" problems IMO.

The only bit of like, intentional "metagaming" I see people taking steps to avoid at my tables is when we have separate scenes going and somebody is in urgent danger and other characters can't know that.

I gotta say, AW is pretty strong about wanting things to stay in character, and DW is also rather explicit here. But that being said, the GM should address the PCs, not necessarily IC through another character. Still, when asked a question, the player should be answering in character. The focus should be tight on the characters. There's nothing like some side channel of talk. Not until EOS.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, it certainly looked like a big deal. And for the 4e fans I heard from on this very site, you's think it was some kind of answer to their tabletop prayers, so I'm not sure that describing 4e's changes as "not a big deal" can be universally applied here the way you are doing it.

Mechanically the changes are pretty straightforward. As I said in another post, the real change is in attitude towards the players. While 4e certainly supports a kind of trad play, it's much more transparent. A GM cannot fudge or play by some hidden set of rules. On top of that it is well-suited for Narrativist play with the way lore is keyed into play, quests, etc. But any of this could have been accomplished by 3.5. However 3.5 needed to be firebombed anyway mechanically for a few reasons, so it made sense to do a cleanup.

Conceptually 4e is a significant departure. Mechanics wise, not that much.

 

[Lanefan]

Interestingly quite a few of these seem actually moves the gameplay closer to the root.

Does that happen in real play though? If this is an extreme edge case it hardly seem like a "big departure". And I cannot remember any rules requiring converting a monster as a minion? Monster vault is having separate minion creatures with unique names and stat-blocks.

Monster vault?

In any case, in all other editions a monster's hit points and abilities are intrinsic to it and don't change based on its surroundings and-or the company it is keeping.

Come on! The Tank, Healer, Damage dealer trio was effectively codified into D&D from the first publication. They managed to muddle it a bit up, but this is basically just a cleanup, clarifying the design.

Healer was always fairly clear but Tank and Damage Dealer used to be the martial classes (Fighter, Cavalier, Barbarian, Ranger in 1e) that did both at once. There was never a "Leader" role built in, and if someone took on such a role within a group the class of said character would vary from one table to the next.

This was big and new. Cleaning out the spell list fiddling was likely their gravest game design mistake with regard to player retention.

Along with putting martials on the same structure.

3ed introduced this. From my understanding this was a big controversy in the 3ed design team. This was just going back on that decision to pre 3ed sanity. (Edit: Maybe new that they did not suggest making full blown PC characters as rivaling parties. But I believe there was nothing stopping you from doing that, beyond it would be blowing away some of the benefits of going from 3ed to 4ed, as you then again have to handle hard to run NPCs.)

In 1e and 2e NPCs with classes were built on the same chassis as PCs. 3e took that a step further, 4e reversed the trend and did away with it.

Yes, they got rid of the low level experience. For many this likely wouldn't be a big shift though, as I get the impression it was common to skip them anyway. Again more of a cleanup/focusing rather than a radical departure.

"Common to skip them" might match your experience but not mine, so we'll have to leave it an open question as to just how common it was.

The whole E6 movement during the 3.x era, however, certainly points to there being a significant degree of desire for play to not only start at low level but to more or less stay there throughout.

 

[Lanefan]

I can see the pitons and climber's kit and someone didn't secure one of them tight enough and one dude drops as the loose piton/s reveal themselves, while a second makes a STR check to alleviate the pressure on the remaining pitons. That is cinematic.
I envision the first guy could suffer a menu of complications.

Another very realistic narration for failing a climb is that the climber in effect gets stuck in place; there's no safe way forward but climbing back down doesn't look safe either. As a kid I put myself in this position more times than I care to think about.

 

[Lanefan]

No more fundamental than the changes from AD&D to 3E.

As someone else already mentioned, if one was playing 2e up to date with all the splats as they came out, by the end it wasn't all that dissimilar from what 3e-at-release was. Kinda similar to how just about everything in 1e's Unearthed Arcana had already been trial-ballooned in Dragon articles, many of the 3e changes were trial-ballooned in late-era 2e splats.

Looking at 1991 2e and comparing that to 3e, then yes, it was a massive shift.

With both 4e and 5e that trial-balloon process was, in theory, the public playtests.