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

[pemerton]

All TTRPGs have a fiction that creates a rich backdrop for play. For some just watching how this fiction unfolds with minimal interaction ability is just what they want. For others the challenge of trying to force that fiction toward some prefered state with limited means is what makes the game for them. For others it is all about exploring how the fantasy looks like around the preferred state that is interesting - so getting there should be as frictionless as possible.

Eero Tuovinen talks about these different approaches to "simulationist" play in his blog: Observations on GNS Simulationism – Correspondence is about Diligence

 

[Enrahim]

This is not correct. I mean, I learned to play BW from Revised. I only quote Gold because the text is available as a free download from DTRPG.

The stuff that you are asserting is absent from Revised is not.

Page 12: "players take on the roles of characters inspired by history and works of fantasy fiction. These characters are represented by a series of numbers, designating their abilities, and a list of player-determined priorities."

Page 13: "One of you must be the GM . . . Everyone else plays a protagonist (aka, "a character") . . . The conflicts of the characters' aforementioned priorities creates situations for the players to resolve"

Page 19: "As I mentioned in the Introduction, characters are the most important part of Burning Wheel."

Pages 26-7: set out the fundamentals of intent and task (I'm not going to type it out)

Page 32: "If the successes equal or exceed the obstacle, the character has succeeded in his goal - completed the task at hand in the manner that the player described in the Task and Intent sections.

This is important enough to state gain: Characters who are successful complete actions in the manner described by the player. A successful roll is sacrosanct in Burning Wheel and neither GM nor any other payers can change the fact that the act was successful. The GM may only embellish on or reinforce a successful ability test."

This is then followed by the same 3 examples as I quoted upthread from the Gold Hub and Spokes.

Page 34: "Two Directions . . . Failure is not the end of the line, but is a complication that pushes the story in another direction. Failure Complicates the Matter . . . the GM should present the players with the possible ramifications of their tests."

Page 75: sets out "Vincent's Admonition" in the same terms as Gold does, including "When there is conflict, roll the dice. There is no social agreement for the resolution of conflict in this game. Roll the dice and let the obstacle system guide the outcome. Success or failure doesn't really matter. So long as the intent of the task is clearly stated, the story is going somewhere."

The text on the Role of the GM and on "the sacred and most holy role of the players" is identical in both versions.


Gold is cleaner. That's the point of an update. It states the role of the GM more clearly upfront. But there are no fundamental changes (there are technical changes, especially to Range and Cover and Fight! - for Range and Cover I use a mix of the two versions; for Fight! I prefer the positioning rules in Revised to those in Gold). This is borne out by the fact that the commentary in the Adventure Burner (written for Revised) is reiterated almost word-for-word in the Codex (written for Gold).

When you look at the bibliography in revised, and see Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, The Riddle of Steel and My Life With Master, those are not titles that got lost on their way to an indie RPG party. Burning Wheel is a RPG influenced by all of them. If you try and play it in a way that priorities setting over character, with the GM driving, the game will break down: Beliefs won't work, Artha won't work, Circles won't work, Wises won't work, Relationships won't work, etc, etc, etc.

I absolutely do not doubt the intentions. Indeed looking at the headings and the examples I suspect the gold version are closer to a pre-relaease version but that someone on the design team got cold feet and pushed trough that they needed to tone down the most controversial stuff making it seem like it had something for a more traditional crowd. By the time Gold came out they knew they had the base they needed without making such sacrifices.

But that is pure speculation from my part.

 

[Maxperson]

I understand "independent of the player". That's why I call the RPGing "GM-driven" or "GM-centred".

You clearly don't understand it if you are still calling it DM driven/centered.

Player driven with the DM reacting to the players every step of the way, including random encounter rolls, cannot be considered to be DM driven/centerd.

I assert that, if the trigger for introducing some content into the shared fiction is a die roll, it doesn't become less "quantum" because the GM rather than the player rolled the die.

And this is just more proof of your lack of understanding. It was several hundred pages ago that we established that differently quantum was the issue. You make it quantum to the player/PC, we keep it quantum to the DM only. That you also tie the bad things to mostly irrelevant failed rolls and the skill of the person engaging in those rolls is also an issue for us.

 

[CreamCloud0]

This isn't my experience. Competent people make their own luck, along these sorts of lines:

competent people who 'make their own luck' still can't control the universe

 

[The Firebird]

This isn't my experience. Competent people make their own luck, along these sorts of lines:

How precisely does a thief "making their own luck" result in an unknown cook sleeping soundly?

 

[pemerton]

Yes. The fact that D&D is so commonly used for a simulationist agenda (or play with no particular CA agenda that has simulationist trappings) does not mean that the game engine itself is oriented towards sim. There are better games out there that are more oriented towards sim as an explicit agenda.

Right.

I mean, I sometimes find that these threads have a bizarre character, where posters like @Micah Sweet accuse me of hating, or not understanding, simulationist priorities, when I GMed Rolemaster for 19 years and 1000s of hours. Even my Burning Wheel games are more simulationist, in respect of character build and some core aspects of resolution, like how injury is handled, than is D&D.

The same is true for 4e D&D combat, which was important to my enjoyment: because most attacks have an effect as well as just cause hp depletion, the resolution of hits in 4e combat actually tells us something about what is happening in the fiction.

I got hit for 15 hp of damage is not part of any sort of simulation. It's the sheer mechanical working out of a somewhat intricate countdown clock.

 

[pemerton]

competent people who 'make their own luck' still can't control the universe

I don't know any RPG where any PC can control the universe, so I'm not sure how this remark is meant to factor in.

I mean, competent people control more of the universe than incompetent people. That's inherent in their competence, and is part of how they make their own luck.

 

[pemerton]

As far as I could tell your statement didn’t include any comparison class.

It alluded to one, though.

 

[pemerton]

One is an action the character is taking, the other is the chance that something will occur that is completely independent of the character's action.

But this just brings us back to the commonplace observation that getting sprung and/or startling someone is not completely independent of the action of breaking into a house. They're actually pretty tightly connected.

 

[AlViking]

it's not more realistic if complications happen less when competent people are performing the task, the world doesn't care who is performing the task or how skilled they are, be it the three stooges or james bond, if the cook is going to be on the other side of the door then the cook is going to be on the other side of the door regardless of who is opening it.

Failures happen less when someone competent is taking the lead, Complications are entirely independent.

Unless you're playing a game where the rules tell you that a complication happens on a failure. In those games the world is not independent of the player.

Which is fine. I don't want to play that game. But why others can't accept that we play a game were the world acts independently of the characters and the players only influence the world through their characters is beyond me.

These are just two different approaches, neither is better or worse. Just different.