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

[Faolyn]

I was under the impression that the line of discussion was about how to apply the fail-forward principle in D&D (while adhering to D&D's mechanics).

It's also not how fail-forward works regardless of game. If the die doesn't roll high enough in D&D, you can still have other consequences besides "it doesn't work."

 

[clearstream]

Really? Given that 99% of FRPGing takes place in an utterly amorphous world, as far as history and culture and society go, I'm not convinced by this.

The conjecture that most RPGing takes place in an amorphous world makes it more rather than less probable that "the abstractions did not concretely represent either [a Japanese or Viking setting]".

As my post explained, the PCs were deliberately built to permit either possibility: a swordthane or samurai; a werewolf or fox spirit; a shaman; etc. The setting thus did precede the abstractions, quite deliberately. And the group did choose a setting before playing. As my post also explained.

Perhaps some sort of bland-neosim is possible where the setting is so muddled or weakly abstracted that it makes no difference whether a character is a werewolf or a fox spirit?

You've written a few times words to the effect that

I'm confident that the manifesto is supposed to rule out the sort of methods that were used in this example of play.

What is the basis for that confidence? How do you suppose the manifesto rules out the methods referred to in the play report?

 

[AlViking]

So the lockpick roll… I’d use one roll to determine the outcome overall. I wouldn’t require a lockpick and then a stealth roll to pick the lock quietly, and then a stealth roll to open the door, and another to move quietly over to the cook.

I actually ran a 5e oneshot this weekend because I travelled to meet up with some friends for a birthday. I used several alternate techniques than standard 5e ones.

I let the rogue lead a group stealth check. I had the other two players roll for their characters. Success on their roll would give advantage to the rogue. Failure would give disadvantage. If they split, the rogue would roll normally. The rogue’s roll then applied to all members of the group.

I had a situation where they needed to climb a cave wall, and there was some time pressure. The cave wall was 80 feet. I didn’t have them make multiple checks based on climbing movement rate. They just had to make one roll. One of the players failed, so the penalty was not that he failed to climb the wall, but that it took him a long time. This mattered for the next encounter, due to the time pressure.

I used clocks to handle a couple of complex skill challenges, and made them player facing. There was a ritual being performed and when the clock filled, it would be completed. Another was for reinforcements to show up. An argument could be made that both of these things were beyond what the characters would know… but it was trivially easy to tick the clock and then narrate something that the characters observed (first tick was a goblin yelling down a side corridor, obviously calling for help; next was howls and growls echoing down the corridor in response; finally torchlight and shadows of additional enemies seen on the tunnel wall).

It all went well. The game ran fine… arguably smoother in some ways, though I can’t say that for sure. But one of the players… the birthday boy, who is easily the most trad-minded player in my longtime game group, commented about the “rulings” I made and how he thought it really enhanced play. In particular, he really liked the way the clocks helped portray the tension of the mounting threat of reinforcements and the ritual progressing.

Now… having said all that, I realize that not everyone would love these changes I made. To be honest, I was a little nervous to use them in a game with the birthday boy. But that doesn’t mean they can’t work. It doesn’t mean that there was anything more quantum about this game compared to others. It didn’t result in a bunch of “metagaming”.

What it allowed me to do was run a game with no prep, and to challenge the players and their characters in a way that worked and which didn’t need to be done ahead of time.

Other than the fact that I would usually use group checks where half the party has to succeed to pass, none of the examples you gave from your game sound out of place in games I run. Maybe some details would change. I like complex multi-step skill challenges now and then, as long as it's not "make 1 bad roll and everybody loses", they can be a lot of fun. How to make skill checks interesting could be a whole other thread.

But that doesn't have much to do with a failed sleight of hand while picking a lock meaning that there's suddenly a cook in the room or a guard being somehow notified.

 

[Faolyn]

That would probably be dependent on how important the house is likely to be or become in play.

And you may not know until you get in it.

In a case like this where the McGuffin is in the house thus in theory making it ironclad guaranteed the PCs will show up there at some point, knowing the likely* movements and locations of the occupants of said house does become rather important, thus at least giving it some forethought and making a few quick notes is probably worthwhile. Ideally, this process will be completed well before the PCs get there so as not to be biased by the approach the players then decide to have their PCs take.

* - "likely" because people aren't robots; even though the Lady of the house takes a bath most mornings, maybe for some random reason she skipped it this morning and thus isn't where expected at 9 am; this is what random dice are for. Easy to abstract by simply overlaying a flat x% (where 'x' is whatever amount seems reasonable) chance of variance from pattern for anyone in the household at any given time; e.g. the Lord of the house is usually in his study in the afternoons but there's an x% chance he's not, he could be out strolling the grounds or have gone into town or whatever instead. The chance of variance from pattern would be higher during the day than at night, as people's sleeping and waking patterns are usually quite reliable.

Here we're getting to what was Hussar's main complaint ages ago: this is an incredible amount of prep for something that really doesn't need it, especially since you can just put NPCs down when and where you need them (as long as it remains logical to the established fiction).

 

[AlViking]

About 15 years ago I was at Yellowstone when the tour bus stopped at a bunch of cars to see what wildlife everyone was looking at. I was at the very front of the bus directly across from a park ranger. A few seconds later a black bear came walking down the street and when it got to the ranger, it turned directly across the street towards me. The ranger wasn't worried and didn't give me any direction, so I wasn't particularly worried. The bear walked past me so close that I could have reached out and touched it. All it did was swing its head towards me like bears do, casually note, "Oh, hey. It's a human." and then swung its head back forward and walked across the field into the woods without ever looking back.

Yellowstone is fantastic for wildlife as long as you respect it.

Just don't try to pet the bison.

 

[Lanefan]

And, thus we keep up the pretense.

Ask yourself this. Why did that group of monsters just happen to meet the party at that point in time at that location? It was all randomly generated. There is absolutely no difference between deciding that one completely arbitrary random roll results in an encounter and another completely arbitrary random roll that results in an encounter.

Why did I happen to run into my friend at the grocery store yesterday? Sheer random chance.

Same principle applies here.

And, then, ask yourself this. Why was there a random encounter roll at all? After all, the odds of a random encounter with a monster are FAR too high to be realistic. That's been established since the early days of 1e. The wilderness encounter rules, if they actually applied to the world, would result in a world that no one could ever travel in. 16(ish) percent chance of a random monster 3 times per day? That's ridiculous.

For most parts of the world, I agree. There's some places (like Australia in the real world!) where everything does want to kill you, however, and there 1e-level odds of random encounters with dangerous things make lots of sense.

More seriously, if there's an in-fiction reason* for there being lots of wandering monsters then I'll roll for them frequently. Otherwise I won't.

* - possible reasons: simple overpopulation, severe predator-prey imbalance in the area, hunting parties out gathering resources for something big (e.g. the party's intended destination), etc.

 

[Pedantic]

Perhaps some sort of bland-neosim is possible where the setting is so muddled or weakly abstracted that it makes no difference whether a character is a werewolf or a fox spirit?

I think there exists a confluence of what you've called neotrad and neosim here, where the process of character and setting creation is intentionally muddled. I'm put in mind if the occasional bits we get in the talkback podcasts for Worlds Beyond Number, where the cast discuss putting together a board of setting touchstone media, desired themes, and and specific questions, which were ultimately synthesized by Brennan Lee Mulligan into a final setting. There's some bleed between setting/character primacy in that work, but I think it points out that creating a setting to allow or even serve specific characters does not preclude that setting then having primacy once it is established.

 

[AlViking]

And you may not know until you get in it.


Here we're getting to what was Hussar's main complaint ages ago: this is an incredible amount of prep for something that really doesn't need it, especially since you can just put NPCs down when and where you need them (as long as it remains logical to the established fiction).

Different strokes for different folks. In my games if the characters are breaking into a house I'll know who's there, whether there are guard dogs and so on. I may not know specifically where they are at any given moment, that's where I would roll for odds of encountering them in any specific room. It doesn't take a lot of prep other than a few lines in my notes. Those notes may or may not include what closet Godzilla is in and what he's doing there other than waiting for someone to open the closet door so he can jump out and yell "SURPRISE!"

 

[hawkeyefan]

Other than the fact that I would usually use group checks where half the party has to succeed to pass, none of the examples you gave from your game sound out of place in games I run. Maybe some details would change. I like complex multi-step skill challenges now and then, as long as it's not "make 1 bad roll and everybody loses", they can be a lot of fun. How to make skill checks interesting could be a whole other thread.

But that doesn't have much to do with a failed sleight of hand while picking a lock meaning that there's suddenly a cook in the room or a guard being somehow notified.

Perhaps it does, though. It’s on the GM to have the outcome make sense. So with the cook, the GM has to come up with a sensible explanation… this is why many of us mentioned having her hear the lockpick attempt and so on.

It very much seems to me that you and some other posters have decided it’s “quantum” and so you’re unwilling to find a way to make it work, or to admit some suggestion made by others is reasonable and addresses your concern.

What I would say about the cook is that if a GM is comfortable and capable of narrating the situation in a sensible manner, then the fail forward technique may be a good one for them. If they’re not, then they should go another route.

“Nothing happens” is a perfectly acceptable option in D&D. I don't prefer it myself, and there are other games that specifically say not to do that… but that doesn’t mean it’s in any way wrong. But if you want something different, you have to be willing to make it work.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Nope. It doesn't do that, either. The monster is there even if the PCs never go that direction is all. If they do, then the roll is just to see if at someone point the party traveling through intersects with a monster already present.

How do the locations of both the NPCs and the PCs remain the same when and encounter is both indicated and not indicated. They’re both in the same location… no?