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

[Faolyn]

Every game you are playing (not every game system) has a setting in which the activities of the PCs take place. that's what is inseparable from the game to my mind.

But that's not the same thing as the book including a map and saying that this is where the game takes place.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

That's fair enough. I think, personally this is a good reason to want a substantively goal/intent adjudication mechanism. It's pretty easy to say "did you get what you wanted?" Or conversely the GM saying something that doesn't give you what you want. As long as a novel situation arises, you're good. That may not resolve every question of whether the new situation is 'new enough', but we should have principles for guidance there. At the very least, always make a bigger change!

I love 4e style SCs for getting this stuff done. A tally was made, so you now have to change strategies. It's very clear, in general.

 

[Yaarel]

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.

For me, "fail forward" happens when players are at a loss, and need the DM to give a hint. The players dont know what to do now, but the DM has in mind a way forward and nudges the players toward it. The players are free to take advantage of the hint or come with with their own new plan.

By the way, a helpful way forward includes, the DM thinks the failure causing a deadend was to a part of the adventure that didnt really matter much anyway. So "forward" means its ok to move on.

 

[Enrahim]

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



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.

You point to a very important challenge, but we have ways around it. One way is factorization. Say we are as an initial attempt at establishing a language we try to establish 200 questions we think might be relevant for play preference that can be answered yes/no/don't care. You then have quite a bit more possible answers than number of atoms in the observable universe ( ) .

Get about 20 relatively random roleplayers to take this somewhat big questionnaire, and do some statistics (factor analysis) and you are very likely to find clusters that belong together. If you manage to find conceptual patterns in these questions you normally can reduce the number of questions in the questionnaire dramatically without any significant loss in information captured. Even if we cut it down to just 5 highly significant questions and insist on yes/no that would give us 32 classes; dramatically richer than anything we have have today, and spesifically targeted for saying something about preference of play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's fair enough. I think, personally this is a good reason to want a substantively goal/intent adjudication mechanism. It's pretty easy to say "did you get what you wanted?" Or conversely the GM saying something that doesn't give you what you want. As long as a novel situation arises, you're good. That may not resolve every question of whether the new situation is 'new enough', but we should have principles for guidance there. At the very least, always make a bigger change!

I love 4e style SCs for getting this stuff done. A tally was made, so you now have to change strategies. It's very clear, in general.

Actually, a little elaboration is useful here. The problem of what is enough progress or evolution of situation is not unique to failure! Success is fraught with the same issue, and it is often a problem in action-resolving systems like most of 5e. The GM is left with a big question, how much success is success? What is a fair number of problems to put in place between goal and character? SCs let you do basically action adjudication and still answer that. AW/DW et al can potentially be a little ambiguous here. BW just gets around it, BitD just measures with effect and scale.

 

[Faolyn]

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.



I've been playing for most of the history of the game with many, many different DMs. It's never happened.

Whereas I have. Not often, but it's happened. And we heard Lanefan talk about examples that have happened at his table.

So it happens. Even if it's never happened to you.

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.

It's not what "I prefer." It's a method used in many, many games, either built into the mechanics or imported into the game (just google "fail forward D&D"). And it typically works quite well at its job, which is to keep the game from stalling out.

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.

Sure, and that's always a good thing. But go back to the locks for a minute: fail forward doesn't necessarily means the locks open. It could mean that the locks don't open, but you've lost time in your attempt, and if there's a time crunch in the game, this is a big deal. It could mean that the locks don't open but now the GM rolls to see if there's a wandering monster, because your scent has been hanging around in that area for long enough that a (rolls randomly) grick has sniffed you out.

Again: what fail forward means is that something happens. It doesn't have to be a good thing.

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.

That's also a good thing. The three clue rule and whatnot.

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.

Why?

Imagine the GM has a plot of the Evil Cultist Awakening The Eldritch Being. Pretty typical D&D plot, right? The PCs want to stop it. But the cultists aren't just standing around doing nothing until the PCs arrive, are they? No, they're getting things together so that they can actually perform their ritual. The PCs are looking for the cultist's lair, of course, but they don't know where it is yet, or they do but can't get there right away. But they do have the ability to stop the individual cultists they come across or otherwise foil their plans.

So we have a clock (a timer, really, but clock is the term they went with). When the clock has counted down to 0, the cultists perform their ritual and the Eldritch Being is awakened.

If the PCs do nothing to stop the cultists, the clock will eventually ticks down to 0. If they work towards stopping the cultists by preventing them from getting a reagent or killing their members--the clock doesn't tick down, because they've delayed the cultists for a bit. If the PCs really screw up somehow, they clock ticks down more than once, because in this case, their failure is the cultist's boon (for example, the cultists may have been given the opportunity to grab extra resources, and they wouldn't have if the PCs hadn't been so incompetent).

Failing to pick a lock would not cause this clock to tick down, unless they spend hours and hours trying to do it, because those would be hours and hours wasted picking a lock instead of finding a way around and getting back to their goal of stopping the cultists.

So how is this not following the in-world fiction?

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, even then, you have to be aware of the entire group. Now, I have young kids, and so if they joined us to play, my players would be far more willing to indulge this type of play. But otherwise? It’s easy to get a more compelling game that just avoids the monster as puzzle trope.

Depends. If one approaches the whole game as more or less a puzzle of exploration, trial and error, and discovery (in both the immediate and long term), then it fits right in.

See I’ve found that just letting the players know works just fine. If they want to go and help the PC who is now in trouble, I let them. Usually, it’s at the cost of not doing what they were doing… so that’s a choice they make that may have consequences.

The situation I have in mind is that the other PCs would be waiting, as instructed by the scout, for the scout to return. And sure, they might get bored of waiting and do something else, but that too should be in ignorance of whatever the scout has got up to or wherever the scout has gone. But if they are content to wait for the expected time, the scout's fate is no longer in their hands.

A variant on this happened in last night's session. I was the scout checking out a castle-like structure in some very high and rugged mountains, the rest of the party knew vaguely what my flight plan was (I had powers of flight) but that was it. As player, I could hear what the rest of the party was doing (online play) but all my character's actions were done by secret note.

The rest of the party in fact had numerous different ways and means of tracking my progress but got into a mild argument over which would be most effective, or could work at all (Reflecting Pool, for example, doesn't work on ice, and the temperature was about -25C). Finally they decided on Clairvoyance; on casting it the caster, looking through my eyes, saw herself and the rest of the party; I was already on my way back to them.

If the ideal situation is that they get that information, then I think it’s probably a good idea to simply give that information rather than leaving it up to the quality of my performance.

The ideal situation is that they may or may not get that info (or that they'll get it but may or may not interpret it correctly, same result in the end). Even when it's blatant, some people still can't tell when they're being lied to.

I expect there may be great variation in this from game to game. Very often, a few sessions worth of play means we’ve barely scratched the surface of the character.

I find there's usually enough to go on even after a couple of sessions that, if the player then misses a session, the rest of us know how to run the character well enough for rock'n'roll. Usually, most players IME pick a trait or personality element for the character and really play it up for the first few sessions in order to set a tone.

 

[clearstream]

You point to a very important challenge, but we have ways around it. One way is factorization. Say we are as an initial attempt at establishing a language we try to establish 200 questions we think might be relevant for play preference that can be answered yes/no/don't care. You then have quite a bit more possible answers than number of atoms in the observable universe ( ) .

Get about 20 relatively random roleplayers to take this somewhat big questionnaire, and do some statistics (factor analysis) and you are very likely to find clusters that belong together. If you manage to find conceptual patterns in these questions you normally can reduce the number of questions in the questionnaire dramatically without any significant loss in information captured. Even if we cut it down to just 5 highly significant questions and insist on yes/no that would give us 32 classes; dramatically richer than anything we have have today, and spesifically targeted for saying something about preference of play.

I've been wondering today whether GNS amounts to a rough stab at a factor-based modelling of player motives. It's authors were able to identify a few, and their limitation was lack of time and process to tease out more. This would make GNS not so much mistaken, as approximate and incomplete.

Baker's criticism could then be taken as right without doing away with the value of being able to point in the direction of at least some motives. Except that he seems to express skepticism where he writes

Every RPG, like every other kind of game, is its own. You can taxonomize them if you want, but then you're constructing artificial categories and cramming games into them, not learning or finding out something true about the games themselves.​

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You know how you can assign a given rule to Drama, Fortune or Karma, if you want, but it tells you absolutely nothing about how the rule works, or why, and it creates illusory clusters of rules instead of fostering real understanding? And the same thing with FitM vs FatE? And the same thing with Effectiveness, Resource, and Positioning? They're convenient stand-ins for what's actually going on, when what's actually going on defies such simplistic taxonomies?​

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And I should be super clear: it's not that I think that there are hybrid creative agendas, coexisting creative agendas, overlaps, gray areas. It's not that I think that G, N and S aren't adequate. I think that the idea of creative agendas altogether isn't adequate. Gameplay doesn't have a creative agenda. Games aren't designed to support a creative agenda.​

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This appears to deny the possibility of knowledge of the sort you're describing.

 

[Lanefan]

It is one version of player agency, yes. There are others. To assert that this is the only possible form of player agency would be incorrect.

The agency to play my character in the way I want to play it is the only type of player agency that matters. Without that, no other types of player agency (if indeed there are any, I'm not sure on that) can functionally occur.

Only if everyone at the table is agreed that such events are an acceptable part of the gameplay experience, and is of the specific mindset and approach such that repeated totally preventable setbacks and problems and (etc., etc.) are a good and desirable part of the experience.

This is not only far from universal, I would say it is quite uncommon in most gamers--not totally unheard-of, but certainly far from typical. Just as there are things you agree not to do because it would be crappy inappropriate behavior at the table, others have different standards for what is crappy inappropriate behavior at the table, and some of them see it as a perfectly good and worthwhile agreement to skip over the "sooner or later" part and just start from a group that has "set a tone for themselves" so that things don't need to "settle down" but are in fact settled from the start, unless-and-until something beyond the pale occurs (and even that would probably be addressed, at least partially, through discussion between players (with or without the GM).

It depends, also, on how attached one is to playing the character you have right now, right now.

Oftentimes IME a character who gets driven out of the party early on, or who leaves of its own volition, reappears later in the campaign and gets played then. Having long sprawling campaigns helps here too; little if any of this works in a hard-line AP where the expectation is that it's a unified party running through a string-of-beads campaign in a year.

For a lot of gamers--I would argue the majority--whining "but it's what my character would do!" when everyone glares at you because you did something that annoyed, frustrated, or upset the other players will get the perfectly appropriate response of, "Well then, because YOU are completely responsible for deciding what character to play, then you chose to be an enormous cowpie, and we aren't really interested in dealing with your bovine feces." Blaming the character as though that somehow removes any responsibility from yourself is ridiculous--100% of the beliefs, thoughts, preferences, and choices belong to and come from you, the player of the character. "It's what my character would do!" acts like, because the character isn't identical to you, you're somehow completely innocent for any dickish things your character does, when...no, you're literally 100% responsible for those things.

"Don't be a dick" is generally a widespread basic minimum of human decency. If we add "to your friends", and then apply that to characters? "Don't be a dick to the other players" means...sure, you can play a character who is just a big jerk in general, but their big jerk behavior better be mostly directed outward, or not so egregious as to invite a death glare from other players.

That's where keeping character and self separate comes in. If my character is getting death glares from the other characters in the fiction, that's fine. But ideally at the table we're laughing about it, or perhaps trading meaningless barbs "Why I oughtta...". Or maybe the other players are giving me death glares because that's what their characters are doing and they're roleplaying true, and that's also fine.

Seriousness in the fiction, frivolity at the table. Now you're talkin'! But it does take the right group of players, for sure; and I encourage one and all to find such forthwith.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

I guess I'd better repeat: that riddle-door situation only happened once. Most of the time we solve puzzles pretty fast (sometimes disappointingly fast for the DM!).

When I'm the DM I'll put puzzles in, for sure, but they're usually either a) hard-to-solve mazes involving teleporters or b) long-term puzzles e.g. a poem full of clues, where the solution only becomes apparent as you go along. An example of the latter, from my current game:

sister eaten never beaten
with rikusion in villaroto
brother calling always falling
through illusion asiri's grotto
black sheep holds the black sheep
in white hands frozen
with these the camuloto
reveal the chosen.

This was found on a piece of paper wrapped around a highly magical crystal, in the first of a 5-adventure arc where they went after three other crystals (here hinted as "sister", "brother", and "black sheep") then had to do something with them.