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

[AlViking]

Which, again, is something that often isn't allowed in skill checks. How many times do you let your players attempt to pick the same lock?

Personally I kind of allow it twice. First time they open it in a few seconds if they didn't completely blow it they can still open it but it's going to take a while. Of course that's a house rule.

But as always picking the lock will either mean something relatively inconsequential such as they miss out on some treasure or they have to try a different option. There are many ways to make "nothing happens" interesting.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So... you don't have a problem with what @AbdulAlhazred said?

One of us misunderstood the other here.

 

[Faolyn]

One of us misunderstood the other here.

You can't say objectively (as @AbdulAlhazred presented their statement) that a game needed to be "firebombed" when it is quite clear that there were plenty of folks who liked it (and many whom I expect still do). Had the poster simply said they didn't care for 3.5e personally and explained why, I wouldn't have had anything to say. Yet some people persist in saying their opinion has significance beyond themselves and their tables.

This certainly sounds like you had a problem with what he said.

 

[pemerton]

To say "poof, you're out of Sim" of course implies that you were in Sim.

Not really. It's a turn of phrase. The whole clause is: "when you-as-player get proactive about an emotional thematic issue, poof, you're out of Sim" - so if the whole of play is based around player proactivity about emotional thematic issues, then it never was Sim. Or to put it another way: you could rewrite it as "when you-as-player get proactive about an emotional thematic issue, poof, you're out of Sim, if you ever were in Sim to begin with" without distortion of the meaning.

Using the terms for convenience, the notion that narrativist approaches to play might have been inspired by simulationist approaches, and that a group may segue from one to the other without changing ruleset or campaign, all seems to stand in confirmation of Baker's view

I believe that you're the one who introduced Tuovinen's blog into the discussion, and treated it as a source of insight. If you're now going to reject it, that's of course your prerogative, but feels to this interlocutor like a bit of a bait-and-switch.

 

[pemerton]

A slight elaboration on the above reply to @clearstream:

It can't be true both that Baker's rejection of big model analysis is correct, and that it is meaningful to talk about "narrativist" approaches to play having been inspired by "simulationist" approaches.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure but I think what we are trying to get to is what about those games make them designed for that. Why does that particular design work good for X and other designs work good for Y. Where X might be narrativism and Y simulation, or really anything else.

I can give some individual suggestions when the topic and game systems is at hand, but I can't say I have a general principal beyond "Sometimes a game lacks tools for the job, or the tools present are actually interfering." The problem with making that argument is you always run into the issues of people who either don't want things to actually enable the thing involved (they want to brute force it or ad hoc it) or don't recognize the interference (they're either ignoring the impact or are so used to working around it they can't even see the problem) and the whole discussion turns into arguing about that, to usually no purpose.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Combat is actually an interesting counter point, precisely because it's always a timer. Assuming a standard battle without extra win conditions, you're trying to get the opponent's HP down before some threshold before the party's. Assuming some standardized DPR and that PCs can't do anything fun with breakpoints, each action that you miss and don't apply damage is another tick against the party's HP.

I'm kind of surprised I haven't seen a game that does away with PC side HP altogether, and abstracts the party's cohesion as a clock, that's simply set at the start and ticked up with each round and/or enemy action. There's probably an interesting answer to the healing problem in there somewhere.

I'd suggest because its too determinist, and generally deterministic mechanics with that much impact aren't popular. People sometimes don't want too much swing in there, but you could do something with flat damage accumulation and you don't see that, either.

Anyway, if you have imminent time pressure on any situation, then you never need to introduce new complications, because each action declaration has an understood cost immediately. Perhaps there's a model of play that drives aggressively toward such tense situations with limited action space; some kind of modified scene framing (situation framing?) that requires the GM to set a clock before the players are called on to roll.

There's certainly games that make a lot more use of clocks in their mechanical resolution in general than others I think it'd require reframing what's going on in some situations to use it universally though (maybe porting over your suggestion above to some others--if you fail enough rolls you take serious harm, or are assumed to take harm in increments every time you fail).

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's "nothing happens." For all we know, the answer was correct, but it needed to be sung, or said in a particular language. Therefore, it's not actually useful information at all, and it's certainly not "something happens that moves the game along."

You'd at least need a sharply finite number of possible answers for it to be useful.

 

[TwoSix]

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.

The problem with “IC-authenticity” as a play virtue is that it’s completely unprovable that anyone actually does it. Any declared action can be held as “true for my conception of my character” and no one can contradict you!

If you can’t demonstrate you’re actually doing it (you can only assert it), it’s pretty useless as a normative goal for play.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Perhaps some reframing of what part of the game loop is actually being engaged is relevant here. Players basically do two things: ask the GM for more information about the situation and declare actions that take them to a new situation. Should some of these failures be viewed more as part of the first activity rather than the latter? Or heck, is the roll sometimes determining which of those two activities the PC gets?

You could imagine a modified fail forward type rule that doesn't require the situation change, but does require the GM to detail more about it.

That's largely what Chill 3e does with a lot of rolls; since so much of the game is about gathering information, a roll even vaguely in that sphere will always provide some; better or worse rolls just change how much.