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

[pemerton]

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

You seem to be confused. "Intent and task" is Burning Wheel resolution. It can be applied in other games played with scene-framing and stakes (eg Prince Valiant and Cthulhu Dark, I say based on experience).

But 10+ is a reference to Apocalypse World and similar games, which do not use intent-and-task resolution. They use "if you do it, you do it".

 

[pemerton]

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.

Obviously. I'm not confused about people being surprised. My post is about the mechanic, and how it relates to the time sequence of events at the table compared to the time sequence of events in the fiction.

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.

Of course it can. D&D just happens not to.

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.

<snip>

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.

Yes, there are supposed to be reasons in the imagined world. But those reasons don't affect the roll; and the game can be played without ever actually settling on what those reasons are.

And of course every RPG supposes that there are reasons in the fiction to explain whatever is imagined by the participants. So this can't be enough to satisfy the manifesto's demands.

Their effects on the fiction are satisfied through their representations.

But there are no representations. The roll for surprise in D&D is not a representation of anything. It is a process for randomly deciding whether to narrate <this> - a fiction where the characters are aware of their surroundings - or <that> - a fiction where, for some reason that the process doesn't itself determine, the characters are distracted.

Everything necessary to account for surprise is already there (in world) even if we haven't gotten around to speaking about it.

I reiterate that this is true of all resolution systems in all RPGs. So if this satisfies the manifesto, then all RPGs satisfy the manifesto. But clearly that's not what its author intended.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which is exactly why I have such a dislike for this "game-as-artifact" concept.

You can now fluidly move back and forth between discussing the high-level philosophy distinct from every game, making pronouncements about what should or should not be done. But as soon as someone assails the bailey, you retreat to the motte of "well I'm just talking about MY game".

And then you go right back out and begin using the bailey again as soon as the assailing force has left. The perfect structure; you can make blanket statements all you like because when challenged they're only about your game, where no one could possibly dispute your position, but then you'll go right back to talking about the game generally, "system" in the new verbiage.

This is all preference anyway. I don't see how my comments about how I like to play are a problem for you, or why I can't describe the kind of play I like and why without being told my rhetoric attacks your position. I'm not trying to say anyone's play is wrong for them, or doesn't really exist, or should be abandoned because I can't get close enough to my ideal to suit them.

 

[AlViking]

Obviously. I'm not confused about people being surprised. My post is about the mechanic, and how it relates to the time sequence of events at the table compared to the time sequence of events in the fiction.

Of course it can. D&D just happens not to.

So the game is supposed to give descriptions of everything that happens? Everything tree, leaf, bug? Do they need to be able to explain that my character was thinking about that poker game where he lost money the night before so therefore was not paying as much attention as they could?

Since you referenced it, here's what Sorensen says

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.​

​

Rules are not directions for play. They are not orders. They are not codifications of some external system, such as a narrative arc or erstwhile genre trope. All story is post-hoc.​

You may not care for the approach D&D chose but it is just an abstraction of a larger more complex fictional reality.

Yes, there are supposed to be reasons in the imagined world. But those reasons don't affect the roll; and the game can be played without ever actually settling on what those reasons are.

And of course every RPG supposes that there are reasons in the fiction to explain whatever is imagined by the participants. So this can't be enough to satisfy the manifesto's demands.

But there are no representations. The roll for surprise in D&D is not a representation of anything. It is a process for randomly deciding whether to narrate <this> - a fiction where the characters are aware of their surroundings - or <that> - a fiction where, for some reason that the process doesn't itself determine, the characters are distracted.

I reiterate that this is true of all resolution systems in all RPGs. So if this satisfies the manifesto, then all RPGs satisfy the manifesto. But clearly that's not what its author intended.

The surprise roll is a representation of the fact that we, as fallible creatures, can be surprised.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And yet they demonstrably are.

"I could not get the lock open, and the consequence was that I got rained on" is very clearly a straightforward causal relationship. The inability to open the lock is precisely why the rain had the opportunity to get you wet. "I didn't get the lock open" causally produced "I got wet".

Are you now going to argue that my clicking a mouse button is not the cause of my post appearing on this board? Because by your logic, we can't make that claim. Likewise, "because someone poisoned his food, he died" is an invalid causal relationship, nor is "because I struck him with a flametongue sword, he was burned", nor is "because I spent money, I acquired a bag of holding", nor...etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Apparently, all one can say when poisoning food is that one caused the food to be poisoned. The poisoner is now completely guilt-free, since they didn't cause the death, the poisoned food did. The sword-swinger didn't cause the burning, the flames did. The customer doesn't actually get anything, because all they did was pay coins--that doesn't CAUSE them to acquire goods in exchange.

Thank the good Lord our courts don't follow this doctrine, and instead recognize that just because a proximate cause exists doesn't mean ultimate causes don't!


So, if I can pick the lock of my friend's jail cell, and then walk back out through the unlocked door afterward, the person inside could just open it from the inside and leave?

I don't speak for others, but my position is that ultimate cause and effect are irrelevant to the mechanical task being accomplished, and that's what I'm concerned about here: how a specific action is represented in game. Clearly (to me anyway), you prefer to bundle intent into your resolution mechanics. That's fine for you, but it's not what I want. I want the mechanical resolution to deal with the task, and the intent be handled through PC/GM interaction and narration (until a new task needs to be resolved).

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Well, this is more of an ideal preference. Obviously there will always be situations where the rules don't directly model in-game processes, because it's a game and that's not always practical. The preference is to minimize those situations.

 

[FrogReaver]

@pemerton

I think your perception example is good. I’ve not got a good response for it yet.

The closest counterpoint I’ve seen in the thread was @AlViking’s, but it seems to justify the use of any mental mechanic which is generally unacceptable.

 

[AlViking]

@pemerton

I think your perception example is good. I’ve not got a good response for it yet.

The closest counterpoint I’ve seen in the thread was @AlViking’s, but it seems to justify the use of any mental mechanic which is generally unacceptable.

In D&D and related games the mental mechanic that people have issue with is telling people what they think unless there's external forces at play.

On the other hand mental mechanics are used all the time with various knowledge checks and what we can discern about the world around us. Does your character know anything about the history of an item or do you perceive the ninja sneaking up behind you. Those are your character's capacity to know things external to your character, things you have read, heard or experienced in the past, noticing something in the present.

We like to think we are in control of our our own thoughts, but we all know we don't have perfect memories and occasionally don't notice everything going on around us.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Perhaps. Just from that very first principle, however, I find something to at least raise my eyebrows at. "If, at any point, any aspect of the game begins to clash with the veracity and truth of the fictional world, change it." That means, even if everyone at the table agrees that something being true in the fictional world is a less enjoyable experience, the less-enjoyable experience MUST be enforced, no matter what. I don't believe anyone, even "new simulationism" fans, sincerely believes that something genuinely agreed to be antagonistic to enjoyment should remain true, and that instead the understanding of the world needs to change so that the players will actually enjoy playing in it, even if that requires a little bit of light rejuggling.

Good catch, I find this quite interesting. I can only speak to my table of course how this almost came about for our game (and we were committed to following it through).

A while a ago each PC was banished from a dimensional plane that was closed. I decided the banishment would work in a way to banish them to a location their PCs most desired based on my conversation with the players and their characters' TIBFs. And so I provided each of them around 2-3 scenarios to select from.
One of the PCs (the meta-gamer) made a choice that was unexpected which saw his character banished to Sigil.

I had nothing prepared and I had never read enough about Sigil to do it justice so I told him we were going to pick this up later in a number of solo sessions when I had done the necesary research on Sigil, its factions etc. In the meantime were were gonna fast track x number of fictional days later when presumably the party was all back-together again.

In any event we (me) eventually found the time when I was prepped enough to run the Sigil-storyline for him. As we played it out, the fictional days started passing, both of us had a surprisingly lot of fun and he (the player) was a little torn to return to the main storyline.
I laid out an idea of how it should play out (a system I was comfortable with) for him to escape from The Cage, Sigil.
I told him in the event, that his character did not make it on time (he had a wide margin of days), I would
(a) Provide him with all the necessary cosmological setting facts etc and he could with much freedom narrate his character's demise while plane-hopping to return home; and
(b) We would have to determine how his Clone by Halaster (long story) would make it passed the Mad Mage and out of Undermountain to arrive in Waterdeep in the time he was supposed to, since we have played beyond this point in-the-fiction with his character and we needed to make the fiction true.

My player funnily enough said he expected this outcome and he was happy enough to work with me here.
So in effect we were committed to forcing that the fiction already established be true even the though it may have been worse off for the player (less enjoyable experience).
As it happened after a 10-hour session with him, he made it home in the given time-frame. The excess days in getting home were given as downtime days for the rest of the party. Any later and we would have had to incorporate the above plan with the use of the Clone (which still exists).

Dice were involved so the probability of things not working out neatly were ever-present.

 

[JConstantine]

Level Up's description of countdowns is pretty darn trad, actually. I just read it and didn't see anything about adding tension, just a way to simulate a situation with an unknown time limit, some what abstractly.

I've not touched any of the Level Up stuff, but I'm assuming it's the same as what's in WOIN, in which case it's a knock-off of the Angry GM's time/tension pool. I imagine the Angry GM would be the first to call their self trad, but the mechanic is designed to add tension.