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

[pemerton]

So you are saying the group need to engage in basic game design in order to play this game?

Which game is "this game"?

If it's any good, it will have rules for permissible action declarations.

 

[Enrahim]

Which game is "this game"?

If it's any good, it will have rules for permissible action declarations.

I am actually most curious about what @EzekielRaiden has in mind. I know of a few ways it could be handled, but none of those seem fully consistent with how he has been describing his preferences and prior communication around this topic (in particular the lack of acknowledgement to @Lanefan 's problem with running a hide and seek scenario while this technique is in play, alongside general skepticism toward GM authority). As such I was wondering if there might be specific way of resolving this question of where the line between acceptable/unacceptable go that I am not aware of.

However if you have observed this conversation and you think you have insights into how the concerns brought up can be reconciliated in light of some system you know; I guess that could be enlightening

 

[Neonchameleon]

I'm happy to begin and end with the fiction, but if as a player the game lets me try to establish some of that fiction (that's not yet been established) via action declaration incuding intent, and on a successful roll that fiction becomes established, then why wouldn't I always declare intents that benefit my character and or its goals?

Because, to be blunt, you're not a deliberate jerk who is setting out to ruin the game. There's nothing explicit in most RPG rulebooks against using loaded dice - but you'd need to set out with malicious intent to do it.

Most of the DMs I've had allow some fiction authoring by the players because it makes for a richer setting and more engaged players. In almost all cases they let you create your own character's backgrounds, and only the most rigid ones won't let you e.g. find a coffee shop in a city, go in, and order a coffee for the party to plan over. Even if they hadn't yet declared coffee was a thing in the setting. What changes is how soft this boundary is.

We know the Desert Rose exists because that's been established in the fiction, and we think we know who currently owns/has it. What hasn't been established in the fiction is its location. It could be in the safe in the wall in the tycoon's house, it could be in the bank down the street, it could be on his yacht in the harbour, it could be in his pocket, or any of a hundred other possible places.

We also know know that the Desert Rose is well protected and that the goal of the current mission is to obtain the Desert Rose. We also explicitly do not know where the Desert Rose is.

And so if we've managed to break into his house and get to his safe, I can declare "I pick open the safe to find the Desert Rose ruby". Task - pick the safe. Intent - find the ruby.

There are two big issues here.

• That is not your intent in the moment of opening the safe. Your intent is to discover what's there.
• The Desert Rose is a textbook McGuffin. It's the equivalent of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. It's honestly not that relevant other than as a thing to chase.

And if the examples I've seen earlier are correct, a full success (roll of 10+ in some systems) will give me both task AND intent,

Apocalypse World is at this point fifteen years old. You could at least have read it in all that time rather than complaining about what you think it says. Let's look at what a full success on a try to find something role actually says.

 

[Neonchameleon]

No, it isn't. I'm sorry, it's just not. I have no interest in continuing this conversation if this is the kind of pure-semantics nonsense you're going to engage in.

Technically he's right. But to actually make it matter in play in 99% of circumstances would be an example of what I've seen described as "zipper DMing"; a DM having a player's tadger caught in their zipper and doing damage because they haven't actually taken the step of declaring they are putting it away before doing their trousers up.

 

[AlViking]

You failed to rescue them. They are dead in large part because of your failure.

So no I'm responsible for every single death that I could have possibly prevented? I must be a mass murderer a million times over without knowing it based on that logic.

But my real question - what does this have to do with the games we play?

 

[AlViking]

So if the PC unlocks the door and rushes in, the people inside still die, because you won't change the fiction to represent in-world events?

If I were to run a burning house scenario there would be a set number of rounds the character had to achieve a rescue. The number would be high enough that the characters should be able to succeed but it's not going to be guaranteed. If it was guaranteed there would be no reason to play it out, just narrate that they saved some people from a burning building and be done with it.

The number of rounds would count down no matter what the characters attempted, whether their actions succeeded or failed. The only way to stop the number of rounds counting down, or even theoretically reverse the count down, would be to successfully take an action to slow down the flames such as summon a water elemental or create water.

 

[clearstream]

Here are two different d6 rolls that happen in AD&D:

*The roll to open a stuck dungeon door.​

​

*The roll to determine whether or not a person (or party) is surprised.​

The first roll is made when a player declares that their character is trying to force open a stuck door. At that point, in the fiction, the PC is standing at the door, about to try and force it open. We can imagine the roll of the d6 correlating to the character's attempt to shove or shoulder the door. As the dice comes to rest and we can read the result, so we know what happened in the fiction: either the door yielded to the shove/shoulder, or it did not.

The second roll is made when the GM determines that an encounter has occurred. (And has not decided that the PCs cannot be surprised.) The time of making the roll at the table correlates to that event at the table. But it does not correlate to anything in particular happening in the fiction at that moment. In particular, suppose it turns out that the PCs are surprised. The reason why they are surprised - eg they're looking the wrong way, or are distracted by sorting through their gear, or relieving themselves (Gygax identifies this as a possible cause of surprise in his DMG) - has already come about, in the fiction, at the time the die is rolled.

@clearstream (and others): this is one reason why I think the "New Simulationism Manifesto" sets out impossible principles. For instance,

All rules are abstractions of a larger, more complex fictional reality. They exist to ease complicated processes into something that can be more easily played with—and nothing more. . . .​

​

When the dragon reaches 0 HP and dies, it does not die because it reached 0 HP: it dies because it has suffered so much damage it cannot endure further. Your game’s abstractions are representative, not authoritative.​

The dragon example seems silly to me, given that it posits a model of killing which is closer to sanding down a piece of wood than disrupting a biological system by drastic interference with its components. If I wanted to run a simulationist combat involving dragons, I would use RQ or RM or BW.

But setting that to one side, the dragon example does not involve a breakdown in time-sequence between events of play and events in the fiction.

But the AD&D surprise roll does involve such a breakdown. Therefore it is a mechanic that is ruled out by the manifesto. The reason that the PC is surprised is because the surprise die came up 1 or 2. And then some fiction is retrofitted on to explain that. (Or not - I've played plenty of classic D&D where we did not bother to establish fiction to explain a surprised result. Nothing in the working of the game will suffer from this laziness.)

The traditional reaction roll (found in various versions of classic D&D, in Classic Traveller, and maybe other RPGs as well) is, in these respects, the same as the surprise roll.

The 2014 5e D&D rules for surprise are no different, as best I can tell. From DnD Beyond,

Surprise​

A band of adventurers sneaks up on a bandit camp, springing from the trees to attack them. A gelatinous cube glides down a dungeon passage, unnoticed by the adventurers until the cube engulfs one of them. In these situations, one side of the battle gains surprise over the other.​

​

The DM determines who might be surprised. If neither side tries to be stealthy, they automatically notice each other. Otherwise, the DM compares the Dexterity (Stealth) checks of anyone hiding with the passive Wisdom (Perception) score of each creature on the opposing side. Any character or monster that doesn't notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter.​

​

If you're surprised, you can't move or take an action on your first turn of the combat, and you can't take a reaction until that turn ends. A member of a group can be surprised even if the other members aren't.​

Why do the adventurers fail to notice the gelatinous cube? At the table, *because their passive WIS (Perception) score tells us so. And then, if we like, we have to make up some retroactive reason, about what the PCs were doing immediately before this moment, that explains why they didn't notice the cube.

I am not criticising these features of D&D. They're pretty unremarkable RPG mechanics. I'm simply pointing out that they don't conform to a dogmatic insistence that resolution rules must model ingame processes.

I'd like to take a stab at defending the manifesto from the perspective of a wargaming tradition that random rolls represent things that are going on (and have gone on) that we haven't shown in our scaled representation. Details present, but omitted from the representation... along with a vast number of other things like flower petals and aphids.

Tying that to D&D surprise rolls specifically, the reasons why the adventurers fail to notice the gelatinous cube are elided. At the scale of play it is because their passive WIS (Perception) tells us so. That doesn't mean that there aren't supposed to be reasons in the imagined world, but they are represented by the scores and rolls rather than narration into the fiction.

I feel safe in saying that fiction about imaginary worlds is ordinarily incomplete. If I were to narrate fumbling for keys, I have yet to say anything about the material my purse is made of. And were I to speak about keys and materials, I have yet to say what else is in my purse that causes me to struggle to find my keys. I do not roll to see if it is handkerchiefs or perfumes, etcetera.

I can read Sorensen's text with the above in mind: the abstraction represents an imagined reality in which there are causes properly positioned in time and space to account for how things play out. Their effects on the fiction are satisfied through their representations. Our fiction consists of what we're able and have time to say about the world... RPGs in which flower petals and aphids are narrated into the fiction are rare (and obviously I am speaking here illustratively of the vast number of details that are omitted.)

If we wish to, we're permitted to cast our gaze back to them but we should not imagine that the suprise roll necessitates that those elements suddenly come into being. That picture makes sense only when we're focused on the fiction qua fiction. Which is alien to this play. The fiction is just our best attempt to hold a conversation about what is going on -- flower petals, aphids and all -- in the imagined world. Everything necessary to account for surprise is already there (in world) even if we haven't gotten around to speaking about it.

One might summarise -- world before fiction. I think one response would be to deny that is coherent, seeing as all we could possibly know about world is that which exists in our fiction on account of our abstraction. This would then get into ongoing puzzles about what sorts of propositions may be said to be true of imagined worlds beyond what is explicitly narrated, given that we feel able to go on to say things that haven't yet been narrated and count them more probably true than other things.

 

[Enrahim]

I'm not really following this ruby discussion.

But to me it seems to be asking how would you resolve an arbitrary action declaration made in the context of arbitrary scene framing, using a methodology that is applicable to games based around very particular sorts of scene framing to support very particular sorts of action declaration.

To which the answer is, "You wouldn't!"

I just saw this. This matches what I think is the core of @Lanefan 's objection, that it seemed @EzekielRaiden did not agree with.

 

[pemerton]

I am actually most curious about what @EzekielRaiden has in mind. I know of a few ways it could be handled, but none of those seem fully consistent with how he has been describing his preferences and prior communication around this topic (in particular the lack of acknowledgement to @Lanefan 's problem with running a hide and seek scenario while this technique is in play, alongside general skepticism toward GM authority). As such I was wondering if there might be specific way of resolving this question of where the line between acceptable/unacceptable go that I am not aware of.

However if you have observed this conversation and you think you have insights into how the concerns brought up can be reconciliated in light of some system you know; I guess that could be enlightening

I don't think @Lanefan has significant play experience or other familiarity with RPGs other than AD&D and variants, and so I don't give much credence to his views about what is or is not possible with various sorts of techniques not found in AD&D.

But suppose the action declaration is to find some treasure, and that the game being played is 4e D&D: then, the plausibility/permissibility constraint will be established by the treasure parcel rules.

In a fantasy variant of Marvel Heroic RPG (first session set out here), the PCs had travelled to the bottom of a dungeon, the vault of the Drow. While most of the PCs fought Drow, one of them - the trickster - duped one of the Drow into telling him where the gold was cached, and then ran off with the gold. Mechanically, in that system, this was about creating assets.

I already posted this example, which has some resemblance to documents, upthread; it happened in the same Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy game:

the PCs had been teleported deep into the dungeon by a Crypt Thing (mechanically, when the PCs confronted the Crypt Thing the Doom Pool had grown to 2d12 and so I spent it to end the scene), and all were subject to a Lost in the Dungeon complication. As they wandered the dungeon looking for a way out, I described them coming into a large room with weird runes/carvings on the wall. One of the players (as his PC) guessed that these carvings might show a way out of the dungeon, and made a check to reduce/eliminate the complication. The check succeeded, and this established that his guess was correct. (Had it failed, some further complication might have been inflicted, or maybe the carvings were really a Symbol of Hopelessness, and the complicaion could have been stepped up to a level that renders the PC incapacitated.)

I described the weird marks on the wall, but I did not, and did not need to, think about what they might mean. That was resolved by the player declaring an action to read them, to see if his (and his PC's hope) that they might show a way out was correct. The roll succeeded, and thus the complication Lost in the Dungeon was eliminated.

 

[AlViking]

Here are two different d6 rolls that happen in AD&D:

*The roll to open a stuck dungeon door.​

​

*The roll to determine whether or not a person (or party) is surprised.​

The first roll is made when a player declares that their character is trying to force open a stuck door. At that point, in the fiction, the PC is standing at the door, about to try and force it open. We can imagine the roll of the d6 correlating to the character's attempt to shove or shoulder the door. As the dice comes to rest and we can read the result, so we know what happened in the fiction: either the door yielded to the shove/shoulder, or it did not.

The second roll is made when the GM determines that an encounter has occurred. (And has not decided that the PCs cannot be surprised.) The time of making the roll at the table correlates to that event at the table. But it does not correlate to anything in particular happening in the fiction at that moment. In particular, suppose it turns out that the PCs are surprised. The reason why they are surprised - eg they're looking the wrong way, or are distracted by sorting through their gear, or relieving themselves (Gygax identifies this as a possible cause of surprise in his DMG) - has already come about, in the fiction, at the time the die is rolled.

@clearstream (and others): this is one reason why I think the "New Simulationism Manifesto" sets out impossible principles. For instance,

All rules are abstractions of a larger, more complex fictional reality. They exist to ease complicated processes into something that can be more easily played with—and nothing more. . . .​

​

When the dragon reaches 0 HP and dies, it does not die because it reached 0 HP: it dies because it has suffered so much damage it cannot endure further. Your game’s abstractions are representative, not authoritative.​

The dragon example seems silly to me, given that it posits a model of killing which is closer to sanding down a piece of wood than disrupting a biological system by drastic interference with its components. If I wanted to run a simulationist combat involving dragons, I would use RQ or RM or BW.

But setting that to one side, the dragon example does not involve a breakdown in time-sequence between events of play and events in the fiction.

But the AD&D surprise roll does involve such a breakdown. Therefore it is a mechanic that is ruled out by the manifesto. The reason that the PC is surprised is because the surprise die came up 1 or 2. And then some fiction is retrofitted on to explain that. (Or not - I've played plenty of classic D&D where we did not bother to establish fiction to explain a surprised result. Nothing in the working of the game will suffer from this laziness.)

The traditional reaction roll (found in various versions of classic D&D, in Classic Traveller, and maybe other RPGs as well) is, in these respects, the same as the surprise roll.

The 2014 5e D&D rules for surprise are no different, as best I can tell. From DnD Beyond,

Surprise​

A band of adventurers sneaks up on a bandit camp, springing from the trees to attack them. A gelatinous cube glides down a dungeon passage, unnoticed by the adventurers until the cube engulfs one of them. In these situations, one side of the battle gains surprise over the other.​

​

The DM determines who might be surprised. If neither side tries to be stealthy, they automatically notice each other. Otherwise, the DM compares the Dexterity (Stealth) checks of anyone hiding with the passive Wisdom (Perception) score of each creature on the opposing side. Any character or monster that doesn't notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter.​

​

If you're surprised, you can't move or take an action on your first turn of the combat, and you can't take a reaction until that turn ends. A member of a group can be surprised even if the other members aren't.​

Why do the adventurers fail to notice the gelatinous cube? At the table, *because their passive WIS (Perception) score tells us so. And then, if we like, we have to make up some retroactive reason, about what the PCs were doing immediately before this moment, that explains why they didn't notice the cube.

I am not criticising these features of D&D. They're pretty unremarkable RPG mechanics. I'm simply pointing out that they don't conform to a dogmatic insistence that resolution rules must model ingame processes.

Edit - ninja'd by @clearstream who said it better but a short version ...

Have you never had someone touch your shoulder and jumped a bit because you did not know they were there? Looked for something only to walk right past it? I'm going to assume you have, that everyone has at one time or other. Therefore you too have been surprised at one point or another. The game needs to abstract these things to a level that we can have reliable resolution in game, it does not need to, nor can it, give detailed explanations of how that happens.