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

[Maxperson]

"Very probably"? hahahah come on man.

What? There exists the remote possibility that this is a crazy person tackling me because I'm there and not because I punched out. I am unable to say absolutely that the punch influenced him, because there isn't a 100% chance that it did.

Also, force and cause are not synonyms. You're shifting the argument hear.

I didn't say you forced those things to happen... I said that you punching someone in the eye was a reason they happened.

There's a difference, and you're trying to shift the argument as if I'm arguing one thing rather than what I'm actually arguing.

Ah, the pitfalls of speaking for more than yourself! How am I supposed to address his points separately from yours when you're constantly speaking as "we" as if you're all a monolith?

If you think and admit that they are connected, then why are you arguing so vociferously with me?

Because being connected =/= caused. You are trying to establish cause where there isn't any.

The fire has damaged the structure of the house such that the folks inside (children or infirm, let's say) have no chance of opening it. However, big strong eye-punching Maxperson is luckily right outside and may be able to force the door open!

Naw. I punch a passing stranger instead. Did I cause their deaths? Nope! The fire did. I have no obligation to risk my life to save them.

Okay, so the Cause that led to the Effect of "the farrier appears" was not a dice roll. It seems to have been a player's request.

I treat circumstances the same way 5e treats ability check. I roll if there is doubt as to the outcome. Sometimes there will be an auto yes or auto no. In the case of the cook(or other NPC living there), there's a very, very small chance someone is awake in the middle of the night when the PCs show up, but it's not zero, so a roll would be involved.

How can a player's request cause a farrier to appear? Sounds suspiciously quantum to me...

It didn't. The farrier was always there, because the town would have had one for hundreds of years. I just forgot to add it.

The player's request didn't cause the farrier to appear. The only thing it caused was me to consider whether one would have been there or not.

 

[Maxperson]

Necessary conditions aren't causes.

Okay, cool. So what was the point of bringing them up in a discussion about cause and effect?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Adding a cook to a kitchen seems similar to you as adding a dragon or Luke Skywalker?

Okay, I guess.



I'm trying to look at it not in game terms, but rather as a person with a reasonable understanding of cause and effect.

I'm trying to see how people will classify cause and effect. And how an action may CONNECT to a later event. The criticism is that the events are UNCONNECTED. However, you seem to admit that they are all CONNECTED.

That some of those CONNECTED things have uncertainty regarding the outcome... i.e. can the bystander succeed in tackling you... doesn't make them UNCONNECTED. Again, I'm thinking of all of this simply as I would as a person in the real world who has no idea that RPGs even exist.

Now, to bring it to gaming... it is a preference for all of those individual events to be broken down into discrete instances requiring a roll. Some games will do that, others will not, some will be in the middle. There's nothing wrong with any of those preferences.

But when someone says "I prefer to roll for each individual action because I don't like when consequences are UNCONNECTED to the action" it is simply wrong. Because they are CONNECTED.

Is that clearer?

Not in a way that matters to the mechanics we're using, or the style in which we engage.

 

[Faolyn]

So if I had not been born because she had a headache that night I wouldn't have to answer these questions? Awesome. Another thing I can blame on my parents!

Are your parents rolling skill checks here? If not, don't be ridiculous. We're talking about causal events in the context of the game.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This isn't a gotcha. It's a question. One you repeatedly don't answer to instead answer something else I didn't ask.

Under what circumstances would you add something like a guard to the fiction?

Please note, I am very aware that you would NOT do so on a failed roll. You have answered that unasked question several times now. I'm hoping you'll answer the question that I asked.

So, when would you add a guard? Or a cook? Or whatever new element you thought might be needed?

At some point prior to the PC encountering the situation or making a roll, if the logic of the setting indicates such a person should be there.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm trying to look at it not in game terms, but rather as a person with a reasonable understanding of cause and effect.

I'm trying to see how people will classify cause and effect. And how an action may CONNECT to a later event. The criticism is that the events are UNCONNECTED. However, you seem to admit that they are all CONNECTED.

That some of those CONNECTED things have uncertainty regarding the outcome... i.e. can the bystander succeed in tackling you... doesn't make them UNCONNECTED. Again, I'm thinking of all of this simply as I would as a person in the real world who has no idea that RPGs even exist.

Now, to bring it to gaming... it is a preference for all of those individual events to be broken down into discrete instances requiring a roll. Some games will do that, others will not, some will be in the middle. There's nothing wrong with any of those preferences.

But when someone says "I prefer to roll for each individual action because I don't like when consequences are UNCONNECTED to the action" it is simply wrong. Because they are CONNECTED.

Is that clearer?

Not really, in that downstream connections can often only be observed in hindsight; and we're playing in the here-and-now.

Sure, punching someone in the eye might cause a bystander to try tackling me, and when that attempted tackle goes wrong he sails past me into traffic and gets hit by a bus, and when the bus hits him its sudden stop causes a standing passenger on the bus to fly forward into the windshield, and so on and so on as one thing leads to another. The passenger whose face became one with the bus windshield doesn't know any of this, however; the connections are as yet invisible to him and might forever stay that way.

In game, this all happens one sequential step at a time without foreknowledge of any downstream consequences, because they haven't happened yet. Nobody knows the bystander will get hit by a bus until we resolve his tackle attempt and he wildly misses. Nobody knows a passenger on the bus will get hurt until we game-mechanically resolve what happens to the passengers when the bus makes a very sudden and unexpected stop. Etc.

In the house-on-fire example, at the moment of my failing the lock-pick attempt nobody knows the people inside will later die because we haven't yet resolved any other attempts to save them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

No. I didn't say that. I said that it could.

Here's an actual example: D&D does not care about the nature of injury suffered when a person gets hurt, and has no rules for representing this. Other RPGs do: for instance, Rolemaster, RuneQuest, Burning Wheel.

AD&D does not care about the degree of attention a character is paying while walking along. 5e D&D does, with its "other activities" rules: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/basic-rules-2014/adventuring#OtherActivities

I am not posting about what is good or bad. I am trying to analyse the way game rules work, by paying careful attention to how they work, and how they relate actual events at the table to imagined events in the fiction.

You have no basis for inferring that, given that I posted this:


As I posted, if the D&D surprise rules satisfy the standard set out in the manifesto, then so do all RPG rules. But I don't think that is what the author of the manifesto intended.

I note, as did the authors of RQ and RM 40+ years ago, that D&D comes nowhere near meeting the "minimisation" requirement.

I also note that the manifesto does not agree with what you say here. It says that the only function of rules is to model in that fashion.

I haven't read the manifesto and am not posting in response to it.

The fact that D&D doesn't minimize these situations as well as I'd like is why I tweak the rules to better suit me (like with Level Up, although I tweak its rules too). Ultimately, that fact is why it's not my favorite game. It is, however, the one for which I have the easiest time finding players.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Obviously the rules of the game tell the GM to do do something and the GM chose something that was plausible for the fiction of the world. I'm referring to fictional world logic, not game rule logic.

Going back to Sorensen, the section about abstraction should apply to most games and is just setting a baseline. I don't read any more into than that. The relevant part of what he wrote is that if you are running a simulationist game, the GM is beholden to the world's fiction just as much as the players. So cause and effect means that the guard just doesn't pop into existence because of a failed check which was what I was comparing and contrasting. Perfectly fine in a narrative game, not so much for the simulationist GM.

For reference, from New Simulationism - Sam Sorensen

3. The The GM is a player. Accordingly, they are restricted in their non-diegetic ability to change the world, just like every other player.​

​

If the GM is also author, designer, and creator of the fictional world, they must adhere to the fictional world created before play begins. Once at the table, the world cannot be changed except by purely diegetic means.​

​

When you as GM are struck with the urge to alter the fictional world outside of your diegetic methods, resist the temptation! As you change the fictional world, you deny the other players at the table their chance to play and have genuine impact on the world. Grant them the trust and dignity to make their own decisions.​

I just thought I'd clarify some of this. We have two different modes of Game Mastering being discussed here. The Trad Simulationist and the Neo-Simulationist. Or to put things another way a (trad) DM and a PbtA MC.

The DM created their dungeon. They set everything in there by their design and they (in theory) know everything that is there. (Actual purity for anything is rare and if they'd actually set and modelled everything in there they wouldn't have wandering monster tables the way the older games had them). This is what is normally understood by simulationism.

Meanwhile the neo-simulationist MC is playing to see what happens. They have the first and most important voice at the table - but the other players do in terms of what they investigate, and the rules are also highly opinionated rather than passive observers. The MC knows probably more than any player about what is going on, but they are exploring things with the other players. And if it hasn't been stated at the table it's not canon.

And in neo-simulationism everyone has the ability to add to the fiction with the understanding that they build on whatever is already there. The MC is a lot more restricted than the DM - but also the opinionated rules are encouraging them to actively use that power to often expand on details in many, many ways.

And a big thing that makes a world rich and vibrant is that there are so many people and so many of them have ideas. A trad simulationist DM means there is one person with light input from the rules who created the parts of the world that you can interact with (and possibly the setting has beautiful matte paintings and backgrounds you're green screening against in the setting book). Meanwhile a neo-simulationist DM has the vibrant input of probably four players and an opinionated ruleset has a nice interesting chaotic world that feels, at least to me, more real and as if everything might hold a secret even if the matte paintings and backdrops aren't as pretty.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Are your parents rolling skill checks here? If not, don't be ridiculous. We're talking about causal events in the context of the game.

@hawkeyefan has requested we forget the game several times during this tangent. Not that I have or would.

 

[Faolyn]

There's a considerably more direct and immediate connection of consequence in the first example than in the second, assuming the combat in the first is strictly between me and my foe with nobody else able to intervene in any way. And even there, the projected consequence isn't ironclad guaranteed; my foe could still miss me.

In the second, there's a great many other potential factors that can arise between one thing (I don't get in the door) and another (the people die), not least of which is the actions of the very people I'm trying to save. This makes the connection of consequence much fuzzier in hindsight, and in fact non-existent in the moment in that the people are still alive after I've failed at the door lock.

And when playing a game, "in the moment" is all we have right now. Sure, downstream consequences can arise later, no problem there; and we'll deal with them if and as and when we get to them. But when we're resolving my attempt now to get in through the front door now we can't skip past that to 5 minutes later when those inside the house succumb to the smoke and flames and call is cause-and-effect. There's 5 minutes more worth of potential actions, by me and by others, to sort out first.

Only in hindsight, after the fact, can we conclude anything like "Those people died because I couldn't open the door".

No, there isn't a more direct and immediate connection. As I said, you're more used to it, so you're more used to the connections. Can't open door --> can't rescue trapped people --> they die. That's a pretty clear chain of connections. At least as clear as can't kill foe --> foe is still alive --> foe hits me and I die.

Sure, you can say there's some tiny chance the trapped people won't die, just like there's a tiny chance that the foe won't hit you. But so what? But that is a tiny chance that can be ignored as being a statistical outlier.

We're also not talking about "downstream consequences." We're talking about the moment. In the moment, you are trying to get through that door to save people, and your actions right now will determine their fate. We're not talking about 5 minutes. We're talking about a 1-2 rounds before that 1d6 fire damage/round kills them.