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

[Thomas Shey]

Oh, I'll gladly admit to being a chaos gremlin.

Not with every character, but certainly with some. And I'm far from the gremlin-iest in our crew.

Never mind that sometimes two well-intentioned players just end up with otherwise perfectly decent characters who, when put together, instantly become a powderkeg. Usually but not always, one of them is a Paladin...

As I said, the simple intraparty problems are the least of it (though that can end up being more than most of the group wants to deal with, and can be hard to manage if people are carrying around any expectation that you don't boot other people's characters out of a group casually).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

I'll go a bit further with it. One of the primary purposes of ability scores, alignment, BIFTs, and then on into the more robustly supported sorts of frameworks of modern RPGs is to provide both documentary testimony about the character and its ethos, but also to help the players consistently understand and depict it. Basic ability scores proved both inadequate and beholden to other sim considerations, so games like Pendragon and eventually Burning Wheel, as well as FATE and its children, built on that base in various ways.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If the point is that because you are not in character 100% of the time that anything not in character should be acceptable then that’s an illogical conclusion.

Saying I dislike being out of character doesn’t imply there are no exceptions where you feel the benefits outweigh the costs or that ooc is otherwise necessary at that moment. The mistake is treating the dislike as an always without exception kind of statement.

Fair enough, but I think I am suggesting that there's little, if any, difference between us in how much we are in character. But this is one of those things that, while there may be an objective element to it, is simply going to remain in the realm of anecdote and fuzzy definitions forever I'm sure.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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?

Right, but obviously if that is the standard, then the bar is set below ground level! Every check ever will count as forward progress. IMHO there's got to be a new situation. A repeat of the same old action should not be fictionally coherent. In AW parlance the GM made a move after your 9- and the trigger no longer exists for the application of the same move. On a 6- that move either directly precludes continuing the action in the same direction, or promises that such continuation will result in direct harm/loss for the character in question.

 

[Faolyn]

For the record I have never been in a game where we spent hours, much less entire sessions, trying to figure out a puzzle. I'm not even a big fan of puzzles where it's solely down to the players to solve. Especially some of the weird math puzzles that we'd just hand to Jeff to solve because he knew how to do them and the rest of us had no clue. In those cases it's not that we wouldn't have incorrect guesses, we wouldn't have any guesses at all. I don't use them, and the last time I encountered one was over a decade ago when I was playing a series of modules for LFR written by the same author.

Even if I had people in my group that enjoyed puzzles like that 99.9% when we talk about failure we aren't talking about literal puzzles. Unless you're @Lanefan, puzzles that take hours or even entire sessions to solve the percentage of puzzles that take more than a few minutes are approximately 0.

OK, but substitute puzzles for anything else out there. And even if your game never has any times where the players are stuck for ages trying to get past a specific point, there are games where that happens.

"But why aren't the players doing something else and looking for a different way around?" Not the point. If every player out there always looked for another way around, and if every GM out there thought to put multiple ways around, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Well there’s the gap in communication. I’m not saying your implementation of fail forward does that. I’m saying why isn’t that technically/definitionally one implementation of it? I don’t think @Maxperson is right that it has to be something interesting. Most of my blades in the dark successes with consequences weren’t particularly interesting., take some heat or stress or click a clock or something. What each of these things did was interact with the rules in such a way as to mean we were one step closer to the complication building up into a major problem. That the particular thing we were trying to accomplish that invoked this roll was resolved and in the rear view mirror.

Personally, I'd consider "building up into a major problem" to be interesting! Maybe not immediately interesting, but definitely tension-building because something is going to happen.

But Blades in the Dark also had outright failure and in those instances it could very much be result in you tried to hit the enemy he blocked it and counterattacked landing a solid blow. Take a trauma. The enemy is still there and needs dealt with. But mechanically the game the game moved one step closer to resolving said conflict either in your favor or the enemies.

Sure, but combat is (nearly) always the exception in RPGs because there's an opponent who fights back, whereas with other skills, it's typically static. Not always, true--that one mirror that attacked on a wrong answer is a rare exception, and there are lock traps--but most of the time.

This seems to be your definitional requirement, that the consequence failure not drastically reshape the fiction, but that it brings resolving a conflict one way or the other one step closer. This explains why the riddle example doesn’t work for you. It’s not about change per se, but about steps closer to resolution.

But it's not a step closer because it provides no useful information other than "this thing doesn't work." We don't learn why it doesn't work, nor do we get a clue as to what would work (at least not according to the description we were given of that riddle). All we learn is that one possibility out of potentially an infinite number of possibilities doesn't work. And even if it were a more reasonable number, it shouldn't be a case of crossing off options on a list until you hit on the right one, because that's a long time in real-time to be spent getting past one point and, quite frankly, boring. OK, combo 5 didn't work, let's try combo 6.

If it's steps towards a resolution, then those steps should be something useful. Whether this is real info the players can use to solve the puzzle, a tick on a clock that's counting down to something bigger, or some other method of getting past gets highlighted ("you don't pick the lock, but you notice a third-story window that seems to be partially opened.") depends, of course, on the task in hand.

Except for d&d combat, which is different than the rest of the game, most d&d actions aren’t going to necessarily bring you a clear step closer to resolution (and even in combat it’s not uncommon to miss entirely and change absolutely nothing on your turn). I think it might be interesting to touch on why d&d doesn’t do that kind of thing. But I think that’s probably best for another post.

True, and that's a major problem with D&D. I didn't play 4e so I don't know how well that edition's skill challenges worked, but I can't imagine it would be difficult to use them in 5e. Level Up has their own countdown system for major tasks, and that's designed to be ported into regular 5e. And it probably wouldn't be hard to bring either of those into any earlier edition, even if you have to use stats instead of skills in 1e or earlier.

 

[Faolyn]

I'm playing a character - or maybe more than one, depending on situation - and that's it. That character is, I hope, an individual free-thinking inhabitant of its setting who maybe does or maybe doesn't consider itself bound by the internal laws of that setting or elements within it (e.g. secular law, temple doctrine, faction loyalties, etc.). The character is not a robot, nor is it part of a machine or navy-seal unit.The character lives and exists independently of the other characters, even if those other characters are its friends or relatives, and I-as-its-player get to choose its ethics and-or morals (or lack thereof) and-or how it goes about living its life (but once having chosen such, I'm somewhat bound to remain consistent with that choice).

And all this applies equally to all the other players and characters in the game.

That's player agency.

And if it turns out that, ater being thrown together by whatever means are used, the characters can't, or don't, or won't get along well enough to function as a party then play it true: if they fight, they fight; if one or more leave or get tossed, let it happen; if they hang each other out to dry, so be it. Sooner or later they'll set a tone for themselves and largely only accept new characters who vaguely fit with that tone, and things will settle down. Leastwise, that's how it's happened every time I've seen it thus far.

And before you say "but what about the DM?", this is what I also want to see when I am the DM.

I wasn't going to say that.

If your character won't work with the party, then don't expect me, as GM, to focus on you all that much--I only have so much attention to go around, and it's going to go towards the people who are actually doing something, not the pizza-cutter lone wolf who wants to be brooding off in the corner.

If your character is actively disruptive to the game, however, then they can go.

OK, look, in the D&D game I'm in, my character is Chaotic Neutral. I push buttons. I give in to my impulses. I sometimes do things that the party doesn't want to do. I may have caused a major issue last session by killing someone we had captured. I also make sure that the DM and the players are OK with my decisions--that I'm not being disruptive or harmful to the game. And I'm not. The characters get annoyed by my PC at times (although the cleric has taken it on himself to parent me at times and try to get me to calm down). The players and GM are absolutely fine with it and often like my antics. Because "what my character would do" is not the same thing as "what I, as a player, would do." Because I, as a player, am not disruptive.

Which is why the "it's what my character would do" is often a red flag, because many people do use it as an excuse to be disruptive.

 

[AlViking]

DISCLAIMER: I'm just expressing my opinion an preferences here, there's nothing wrong with how you do what works for you. I'd include it inline but it just gets repetitious.

OK, but substitute puzzles for anything else out there. And even if your game never has any times where the players are stuck for ages trying to get past a specific point, there are games where that happens.

I've been playing for most of the history of the game with many, many different DMs. It's never happened. You're saying that we should use a technique that you prefer because of something that I, and likely the vast majority of players, will never encounter. Even if they do get stuck, I think it's a GM problem not a game rule process issue. If the players are truly stuck and frustrated that the GM should have presented better obstacles with more options.

Meanwhile there are times when people will spend 10-15 minutes discussing alternatives to overcome a challenge but it's because they're having fun doing it. I don't want to take that away from them.

"But why aren't the players doing something else and looking for a different way around?" Not the point. If every player out there always looked for another way around, and if every GM out there thought to put multiple ways around, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Then the solution is to encourage GMs to be ready to have multiple solutions and to be open to ideas the players think of that you had not considered.

Personally, I'd consider "building up into a major problem" to be interesting! Maybe not immediately interesting, but definitely tension-building because something is going to happen.

I dislike metagame techniques. Personal prejudice I know, but "building up to a major problem" means that you likely aren't following the in-world fiction. As GM you're putting meta-game tokens on a scale and triggering when you hit a certain point something major happens. There may be times in my games when failures stack up, but it will still be following in-world cause and effect. I can't think of a good example off the top of my head but I'm sure there have been times when the normally sleepy guards are suddenly on high alert and forewarn others.

There are many ways to build up tension without fail forward techniques.

 

[AlViking]

I wasn't going to say that.

If your character won't work with the party, then don't expect me, as GM, to focus on you all that much--I only have so much attention to go around, and it's going to go towards the people who are actually doing something, not the pizza-cutter lone wolf who wants to be brooding off in the corner.

If your character is actively disruptive to the game, however, then they can go.

OK, look, in the D&D game I'm in, my character is Chaotic Neutral. I push buttons. I give in to my impulses. I sometimes do things that the party doesn't want to do. I may have caused a major issue last session by killing someone we had captured. I also make sure that the DM and the players are OK with my decisions--that I'm not being disruptive or harmful to the game. And I'm not. The characters get annoyed by my PC at times (although the cleric has taken it on himself to parent me at times and try to get me to calm down). The players and GM are absolutely fine with it and often like my antics. Because "what my character would do" is not the same thing as "what I, as a player, would do." Because I, as a player, am not disruptive.

Which is why the "it's what my character would do" is often a red flag, because many people do use it as an excuse to be disruptive.

I have to admit that I'm playing a barbarian that gets truly bored and will just up and start walking down the hall if everyone else is arguing about what to do. If I didn't think the rest of the players were okay with it though, I wouldn't do it. I tell people in my session 0 that I don't want lone wolves, I expect everyone to figure out why and how their character is going to fit in with the group and so on.

I still have one guy that frequently goes off on his own tangents too much and I may have to chat with him soon because it's getting to the point of aggravating the other players.

 

[FrogReaver]

Even educating require something to educate about, no matter how "confrontationally" inclined one might be.

Obviously that the terms can mean something different than the person think they mean.

Humanity have managed to make clear terminology around highly complex phenomena in a big range of fields. Of course it is not possible to capture the full level of neuance in the kind of human interactions we are having in an RPG, but I certainly believe there are common patterns that should be accessible.

But I'm saying it's the combination of complexity and overloadedness.

Take for example
'I want horror in my next RPG.'
Do I mean the setting is horror? Do I mean I as the player want to experience horror? Do I mean I want to see my character experiencing horror, but not myself? In no other field is a term going to be able to refer to 3 (actually more) different concepts. That's what I mean by overloadedness.

Then couple that overloadedness onto nuanced play preferences, something like I want horror but only from system implementations that don't do X, Y, Z and that do A, B, C each of A,B,C,X,Y,Z also having their own overloadedness. And there's virtually no amount of jargony terms that are going to be able to differentiate all these mixes. We just don't have enough terms. It's essentially a combinatorics problem, where we have more combined implementations than atoms in the universe. No amount of jargon or acceptance of it can rectify that underlying issue.

 

[FrogReaver]

Right, but obviously if that is the standard, then the bar is set below ground level! Every check ever will count as forward progress. IMHO there's got to be a new situation. A repeat of the same old action should not be fictionally coherent. In AW parlance the GM made a move after your 9- and the trigger no longer exists for the application of the same move. On a 6- that move either directly precludes continuing the action in the same direction, or promises that such continuation will result in direct harm/loss for the character in question.

Right, I'm personally interested in where that boundary lies between which new situations are fail forward and which are not. To me it's the heart of understanding it. That's why I don't get the pushback here. My goal isn't to say, see fail forward is incoherent because you can't fully define it to cover all cases and exceptions, it's to try to define it for myself or at least better understand which cases are exceptions.