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

[The Firebird]

And this is entirely a matter of the game being played; picking up the ball and running with it is cheating in association football but 100% central to the game in Rugby football.

And if the rules explicitly allow me, as the GM, to introduce a new character as the result of a failed roll (as they do in almost everything descended from Apocalypse World)?

Yeah, of course it isn't cheating objectively. My OP on the subject said something like "I felt like I was cheating my players", not that I was objectively.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But it’s been explained, hasn’t it? There should now be an understanding. Yet claims are still being made about how “the guard shows up either way in trad games, but not in narrativist games".

I don't know...this still seems more or less true. Details aside, the guard shows up either way in trad games, but not (more or less) in narrativist games, at least it quite a bit fuzzier.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I never considered otherwise. I disagree with @Hussar's assertion that "failure will almost always be catastrophic." My objection was to multiple checks for a series of interconnected micro-actions serving a single task.

To use an actual example:
In campaign 2 of Critical Role, Marisha - as Bo - wanted to run up a vertical surface, leap across a gap, then follow up with an attack. Matt called for an athletics check (which Marisha negotiated to an acrobatics, because Dex-based character) to ascend, followed by another to jump, and then, of course, the attack. Personally, I feel the run and jump could have been folded into a single check. This was made all the more egregious by the fact that Bo was at a high enough level that Unarmoured Movement gave her the ability to run along vertical surfaces and liquids without falling, and no other threat had been established to warrant such a check.
This was not the only time Matt called for a series of checks that would inevitable ensure Marisha would fail.

Perhaps he was irritated by yet another player negotiation for personal advantage on a skill check. This is why there is concern about players naturally desiring to eek out any way to improve the mechanical position of their PCs.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Perhaps, but I don't recall Matt doing this anywhere near as frequently with other players. It may be because Marisha, more than any other player at the table, thinks outside the character sheet, but it always felt to me like Matt was overcompensating in trying to avoid (perceived) favouritism towards his partner. The irony in that is that he demonstrates clear favouritism towards Liam and Taliesin (his longer-time friends).

I'm not going to try and judge Mercer's flaws as a GM; I haven't watched him enough to be competent. So my only point was multiple rolls with any one of them causing the failure of the task is a mechanical problem in almost any system that permits it, and if its not otherwise spelled out it behooves a GM to minimize those rolls as much as possible unless they actively want a high failure chance there.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But... you would know what happens on a success in a trad game as well. In fact, there's a good chance you would have written everything down already, or at least thought about it while writing the adventure. So the only real difference is that you thought it up before, rather than now.

Thinking it up before makes a big difference to some people. I don't think it can be easily brushed aside.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Why is this necessarily a GM facing problem? You could space this at the system level with a more socially designed stealth system, tested in scenarios that match the intended level of competence. Off the top of my head, reworking Stealth as a fixed value that's spent down to perform actions seems directionally like a good start.

The impact of iterated probability is obviously very real, but that's as much or more an indictment of the system designer than the situation. That, and it's only a problem if the player is expected to resolve most situations by making action declarations that resolve as rolls with some chance of failure every time.

Yeah, I've seen games that will have you roll once for a complex task, and simply compare the success chance to the lowest success among the lot. The only objection I've seen I thought had any soundness at all was that it either doesn't tell you which part failed, or automatically means the worst skill total does, but those both seem superior options to what otherwise seems like a false probabilistic output just because the system has chosen to do things as separate die rolls.

 

[Pedantic]

I'm not going to try and judge Mercer's flaws as a GM; I haven't watched him enough to be competent. So my only point was multiple rolls with any one of them causing the failure of the task is a mechanical problem in almost any system that permits it, and if its not otherwise spelled out it behooves a GM to minimize those rolls as much as possible unless they actively want a high failure chance there.

Less common, but the inverse is also a thing you see sometimes, and more commonly in actual play than elsewhere. I'm thinking about the falling from a window scene in Dimension 20's Mice & Murder, which amounted to Brennan Lee Mulligan asking for roll after roll until one succeeded and he could justify moving forward in the player's favor.

 

[Gimby]

Perhaps he was irritated by yet another player negotiation for personal advantage on a skill check. This is why there is concern about players naturally desiring to eek out any way to improve the mechanical position of their PCs.

Isn't "eeking out any way to improve the mechanical position of their PCs" exactly what players in a trad game is meant to be doing? Looking beyond their character sheets, engaging with the fiction, attempting to get successes without having to roll by making clever action declarations?

 

[clearstream]

Yeah, of course it isn't cheating objectively. My OP on the subject said something like "I felt like I was cheating my players", not that I was objectively.

One norm for what may count as cheating is adjusting a choice depending on revealed information. That's excluded if the chef is specified beforehand, but remains available if it's specified after roll. Solo players sometimes express a similar worry, and play that the cannot change a choice once new information has been revealed.

This isn't to express any suspicion that GM would cheat this way, but to show that the cases aren't symmetrical. Revealed information may impinge what GM decides. That could even be counted a positive... but my point would remain.

 

[Pedantic]

Isn't "eeking out any way to improve the mechanical position of their PCs" exactly what players in a trad game is meant to be doing? Looking beyond their character sheets, engaging with the fiction, attempting to get successes without having to roll by making clever action declarations?

Yeah, that's why you get both concern that players can't meaningfully do that, and/or also concerns that they have too much negotiating power from people who've internalized that as a norm. It's a massive commonplace to shift.