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

[FrogReaver]

It would have been fine if something had happened. Attacking is one of many, many options out there.

Something did happen. They learned one wrong answer and they will never guess that answer again. Thus the board state updated. I assume you mean anything more than gaining a tiny bit of information would have been fine?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Which is why you ask questions to get the GM to clarify the situatiuon, as and when needed.

Where I'd rather game design - and, more importantly, GM advice - do what it can to fight against this.

You're there to roleplay and-or inhabit a character, right? So isn't it in the better interests of said roleplaying that you-as-player don't have knowledge or information that your character doesn't and can't know, so you can think as your character without the mental overhead of also having to worry about whether or not you're potentially (ab)using said knowledge?

Because like I said, the GM will never be able to provide the amount of information that would be available to the character. For the character, there is no cypher through which the world is filtered.

So, for me and others, a small breach in the character/player gap is far less problematic than being a secondhand witness to what is supposed to be firsthand experience.

And, as everyone always admits in these discussions, it's impossible to do this 100% of the time. So yes, I think it's a silly approach to shoot for as close to 100% as possible. I think it's better to realize that goal as unachievable and to seek other ways for games to work that make this less of a focus.

 

[AlViking]

Because like I said, the GM will never be able to provide the amount of information that would be available to the character. For the character, there is no cypher through which the world is filtered.

So, for me and others, a small breach in the character/player gap is far less problematic than being a secondhand witness to what is supposed to be firsthand experience.

And, as everyone always admits in these discussions, it's impossible to do this 100% of the time. So yes, I think it's a silly approach to shoot for as close to 100% as possible. I think it's better to realize that goal as unachievable and to seek other ways for games to work that make this less of a focus.

But there's a big difference between "Tell them everything they need to know including the outcome" and "Tell them what their characters should know and if they're stuck or seem to not understand correctly, verify that they have a clear picture from the perspective of their characters."

All preference of course, I just don't come across situations where the players don't know what's going on. If they ever seem confused, hesitant or don't know what to do I'll clarify and ensure they know what the options are. That doesn't mean they know what will happen if they manage to pull the lever.

 

[Faolyn]

Something did happen. They learned one wrong answer and they will never guess that answer again. Thus the board state updated. I assume you mean anything more than gaining a tiny bit of information would have been fine?

That's like saying that if you miss in combat, it's actually a hit.

 

[Faolyn]

No one ever uses the word objective.

Do they really need to? I mean, we can take from context what people mean in cases like this.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But there's a big difference between "Tell them everything they need to know including the outcome" and "Tell them what their characters should know and if they're stuck or seem to not understand correctly, verify that they have a clear picture from the perspective of their characters."

All preference of course, I just don't come across situations where the players don't know what's going on. If they ever seem confused, hesitant or don't know what to do I'll clarify and ensure they know what the options are. That doesn't mean they know what will happen if they manage to pull the lever.

There's also a difference between not worrying as much about the divide between player and character knowledge (which is what I was talking about) and telling them everything (something you've now introduced to the discussion).

What I'm trying to describe is to not make everything a puzzle. I mean, if you have a mystery or a puzzle-box type scenario, that's one thing... being careful with what information is shared makes more sense. But not every scenario is meant to be a mystery.

Like, "who killed the duke"... sure, that's a mystery. What does my character perceive? That's not a mystery. I find that there's not always a distinction between these two types of situations, and I think there should be.

For instance, in a recent game, I told a player that an NPC was lying to him. I didn't call for a roll or anything else... I just said "you know this guy is lying". I did this because that's what seemed to make sense, and because it was much more interesting to put the character in that position and see what the player would do rather than just seeing if he could even figure out that the guy was lying.

Why was the guy lying? What was he covering up? I didn't share that information with the player. That's for them to discover and/or deal with.

 

[AlViking]

There's also a difference between not worrying as much about the divide between player and character knowledge (which is what I was talking about) and telling them everything (something you've now introduced to the discussion).

What I'm trying to describe is to not make everything a puzzle. I mean, if you have a mystery or a puzzle-box type scenario, that's one thing... being careful with what information is shared makes more sense. But not every scenario is meant to be a mystery.

Like, "who killed the duke"... sure, that's a mystery. What does my character perceive? That's not a mystery. I find that there's not always a distinction between these two types of situations, and I think there should be.

For instance, in a recent game, I told a player that an NPC was lying to him. I didn't call for a roll or anything else... I just said "you know this guy is lying". I did this because that's what seemed to make sense, and because it was much more interesting to put the character in that position and see what the player would do rather than just seeing if he could even figure out that the guy was lying.

Why was the guy lying? What was he covering up? I didn't share that information with the player. That's for them to discover and/or deal with.

Sometimes things are puzzles sometimes they're not. Sometimes you can tell someone is lying sometimes you can't. I like the variety.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In previous threads we’ve seen testimony that d&d can be played narrativisticly, albeit the system fights against you and I’ve stated that FitD’s Blades in the Dark didn’t feel extremely different to me than D&D. That’s at least some evidence that player interest trumps system, although system can still either work with or work against said interest, mostly via the mechanism of making the gameplay compelling while engaging in that interest and not placing potential obstacles that may either sometimes or even often supersede whatever thing the player interest is in.

I rather cynically refer to this as "using a wrench as a hammer", but even my comment acknowledges that you can force a system to handle things its not really designed for.

 

[Lanefan]

My initial intuition is that there is little truth to it.

As I've posted upthread, in "trad" RPGing I think there is a lot of "author" stance, especially (i) oriented towards party play, and (ii) oriented towards the stuff the GM has prepared for play.

The fact that "that's what my character would do" is frequently seen as the hallmark of a bad play, in mainstream RPGing, is a sign to me of the relative preponderance of "author" stance.

In my view, seeing "that's what my character would do" as a hallmark of bad play is an outright mistake. Playing the character true and having it do what it would do is to me the hallmark of very good play.

Not sure what "stance" that puts me in, but not too bothered about it in any case.

 

[Lanefan]

Oh, all sorts. Making disruptive comments. I have a player who likes puns, for example. He'll make them on the regular. I don't mind this--I love puns--but at a table where everyone has their "SRS FASE" (as a different friend of mine puts it) on all the time? Such a thing would be incredibly harmful to IC-authenticity without being even the least bit metagame-y.

If the pun-loving player plays a pun-loving character then he's playing it true when he spins those puns.

If he plays a different personality of character and keeps with the puns anyway then he's breaking IC-authenticity.

Or, to use a non-awful version of a crappy example people tend to throw around a lot: a character specifically made to be antagonistic to the setting, such as someone asking to play a robot-builder in medieval China or a cloistered cleric in early imperial Rome. That isn't metagaming--the player's bad choice isn't related to gameplay in the least--but it is a consciously disruptive decision.

Disruptive, sure. Harmful to setting authenticity, very much so. Depending how the oddball character is played, however, the jury's out as to whether this is harmful to IC authenticity.

Most other examples would boil down to playing in bad faith, that is, negotiating for a particular position or explicitly agreeing to that position, and then not actually upholding that agreement.

If you're referring to out-of-game agreements, then yes. If you're referring to in-character agreements, i.e. that the character is the sort who goes back on his word, that's IC-authentic all day long.

Conversely, it is quite possible for excessive IC-authenticity to be disruptive: "It's what my character would do!" as an excuse for obviously craptacular behavior directed at your fellow players. This is nearly as old as the hobby itself, and is one of the reasons many GMs do not permit characters who are particular alignments, usually Chaotic Evil and Chaotic Neutral, since the former is backstabbing central and the latter is either "mY cHaRaCtEr'S jUsT sO fUn AnD qUiRkY, rIgHt????", or an attempt to still be CE but pretending to be something hard to distinguish from CE because of MaDnEsS!!!! Simply put, if the character is a jerk who would choose to be a jerk to the other characters...hiding behind IC-authenticity to justify that choice is a harmful thing to do in most games. There are of course exceptions (just as there are exceptions to pretty much all of these things), but this is definitely a common pattern of bad player behavior.

And this to me is just another Tuesday at the office. As long as it stays in character, let 'em fight. Experience tells me that most of the time they will, ater a while, get it out of their systems and return to more conventional play, while every now and then still letting off some in-character steam with a party prank session or firefight.

And all of it is IC-authentic. Sometimes when they're fighting each other, it's the most IC-authentic thing they ever do.