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

[Enrahim]

GMs having a mental model they develop and evaluate is only more like our moment-to-moment existence as long as we are dealing with environments that have a fairly definite status quo that player characters are exploring and interrupting. Particularly if they are foreign environments player characters have little meaningful connection to or knowledge of that precedes play. It happens that this aligns very well with the sorts of fictional situations we see in most adventure fiction and the more popular tabletop RPGs.

This sort of breaks down when we move into the sorts of fictional situations where NPCs are as apt to disrupt the status quo as player characters or different characters are interacting with different parts of the environment or there's more familiarity and connections involved.

Take a fairly simple court scene where you have 3 different characters petitioning the king about how they think the would-be assassin of the prince should be handled. One is spymaster who believes the assassin should be cut loose so his agents can track them back to the person who hired them. One is the queen who wants a public execution. One is the master of arms who wants the assassin questioned and then disposed of. 2 of these characters are player characters. 2 are NPCs. This is a confab that could take a day or two with interjections by other NPCs along the way. Playing this out in a way that feels real and gets close to our moment-to-moment experiences is much, much harder to handle in a GM's mental model sort of way. My experience is that at least some active scene framing helps to bring this sort of situation to life.

This is why I think a focus on how explorable the situation (and what level of zoom we are operating at) is more apt than trying to argue over which approach is more real (which is going to be very subjective and contextual to the sorts of fiction we are dealing with).

One of the things that is always bizarre to me is that our discussion of different techniques and approaches always seems to land on the sorts of fictional situations that are most appropriate map and key task resolution. Locked doors and mountains to climb with sparsely detailed fictional situations that give them none of the rich situational context* that other approaches require to functionally address.

This is not to say that a rich situational context is not amenable or desirable with map and key task-resolution oriented play. It's just like not necessary for functional play or addressing the GM decision space in the same way it is necessary in other approaches.

EDITED, I think I misread you. I am not sure what you are getting at.

 

[Umbran]

Right, but would you actually run a game that you had no interest in yourself, in a style you don't care for? Not that that never happens, of course, but if you're running a game, it's likely one you're interested in yourself, run in a style you'd want to experience as a player. That was my point.

I feel like this has the goalpost sliding a little bit.

For some of the people here, especially in this discussion, the style of games they are willing to play or run is very narrow. Saying that they don't run games in a style they don't care for is a narrow statement.

Me? I'm well on record that who I'm playing with winds up being far more important than what genre or style or ruleset I'm using, so finding a style I don't care for is actually a notable effort. The assertion doesn't mean much, applied to me.

For me, at least, my personal purpose in running a game is entirely different from my purposes in playing them. I am a pretty solidly service-oriented GM. I just finished one campaign, and then asked my players a ton of questions about what they want to play next. And their responses all point to some pretty traditional stuff.

Meanwhile, if forced to choose what I'd most like to play now, based on game alone, not considering who is playing or offering to run it? Probably one of the much newer, more narrative games on my shelf - not because I am narrative-centric, but just because I've played them less.

What my players chose is probably not in the top 5 of what I would have chosen to play on my own.

 

[AlViking]

Sure, but as I note above, the difference between a making a save and missing an attack is purely administrative. You can even invert it the other way and make the defender roll to defend against a sword swing (or even make one or both an opposed roll) - constructing this so that the final probabilities (which are the only thing that impacts the resulting fiction) are identical is fairly straightforward.

They swapped how the dice were rolled for 4e and for some people it didn't feel right. If I cast a fireball, I'm not the one trying to dodge out of the way, everyone in the area of effect is. Rolling the dice makes it feel more like the character (or monster for the GM) is doing something active. There are other systems of course that use defense rolls of various kinds if your character is attacked, I don't see it as better or worse.

If I'm understanding you correctly of course, it's been one of those days.

 

[Umbran]

So do you just not get to play those games? I can relate.

With some exceptions around online play for the pandemic, I'm usually the GM, and don't get to play much at all. I grab occasions for one-shots as I can. I've recently started an "RPG of the month" series to run one-shots of some of them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Right, but would you actually run a game that you had no interest in yourself, in a style you don't care for? Not that that never happens, of course, but if you're running a game, it's likely one you're interested in yourself, run in a style you'd want to experience as a player. That was my point.

Depends on "have no interest in" here. I'd day I'd have to be actively put-off by the style of the game not to run it; "no interest in" wouldn't be sufficient if other people were, and the campaign/setting interested me. Doesn't mean if the mechanics of the game annoyed me that I'd continue indefinitely, but that's what they'd have to do--annoy me, in a way I couldn't easily fix.

I mean, I'm running 13th Age right now, and D20 games generally aren't my jam; I ended up running it because I thought it might be easier on my one nearly-blind player. The only really strong positive to me in it is its easy prep other than that, and there are absolutely things I dislike about it.

 

[Gimby]

They swapped how the dice were rolled for 4e and for some people it didn't feel right. If I cast a fireball, I'm not the one trying to dodge out of the way, everyone in the area of effect is. Rolling the dice makes it feel more like the character (or monster for the GM) is doing something active. There are other systems of course that use defense rolls of various kinds if your character is attacked, I don't see it as better or worse.

If I'm understanding you correctly of course, it's been one of those days.

Absolutely - I certainly agree it's something that people can find feeling awkward after being used to something one way. It's certainly not a matter of better or worse, it's just that as I hope I've demonstrated, it's purely administrative in terms of the impact on the fiction.

This really came to focus for me after playing a bunch on a VTT with some built in automation - I target something with an effect and a dice roll is generated, essentially, the attacker always triggers the dice roll. This produced endless confusion when sometimes the roll being high was good (when the player was attacking) and sometimes the roll being low was good (when the player's attack invoked a save). This persisted over multiple years of weekly play. Doing it one way would have been beneficial for my group but I can certainly see how some people would prefer it another. Importantly though, the resulting fiction and alterations to the game state would be identical.

 

[Campbell]

EDITED, I think I misread you. I am not sure what you are getting at.

What I was trying to say is that the play techniques and play loops we commonly associate with D&D and similar games do an excellent job of bringing the moment-to-moment experience of exploring foreign environments and situations where player characters are acting upon others - are the disruptive forces - where everyone is reacting to them.

Scene framed play does a much better job of bringing the sorts of experiences where NPCs are acting upon player characters and want things from them. That it handles visceral social exchanges and more dynamic environments better than GM mental-model oriented play. This is particularly true in the sorts of situations where NPCs want things from each other as well. It's easy to frame scenes that feel real around this stuff. It's very hard to model discrete NPC interactions when they are trying to influence one another. Hard to be in the headspace of multiple characters at once.

Scene framing also requires a rich context to even function. I need so much more information to determine what is an appropriate response than the more isolated information environment you need to evaluate task resolution.

I was remarking that we always compare and contrast using the sorts of situations task resolution is best at and scene framing is not really interested in. Locked doors and moving through your environment in isolation are not conflicts. They are things on your way to conflicts.

Like this stuff isn't even stuff you roll for in most of the games I run. It's just stuff you either do or don't do based on fictional positioning. Because there is no tension there. Honestly, not a lot of uncertainty either. Even in something like Vampire I'm mostly just going to look at your dots in Larceny and Dexterity and like how good your lockpicks are.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's down to what's being abstracted, right? Spells fill an area and might be partially avoided, swords connect or don't. The real issue there is AC being used to determine whether an attack "missed" or not. Frankly, I'd expect more pressure to go the other way and explore some kind of dodge rating and armor as DR.

Well, that's part of it, and part of it is what hit points are. If you roll fatigue and minor injury into that pile too, its not that hard to assume some minimal "damage" from misses; its just not what D&D has traditionally done.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, but as I note above, the difference between a making a save and missing an attack is purely administrative.

Eh, not entirely. A lot of save-to-half spells in D&D are, essentially, autohits; there's no targeting on the part of the caster, and initially in the early days, the caster didn't even have any influence on avoidance. Its more like areas in games where there's some kind of diver-for-cover mechanic mixed with a common genre conceit that active avoidance gets you something against explosions even if you don't move a major distance.

It doesn't (or didn't, there may be 5e spells this doesn't apply to) really parallel a to-hit roll very well

 

[Faolyn]

How there was a complication determined matters (this is the heart of sim play). We aren’t opposed to the general notion of cooks being in houses. We aren’t opposed to the general notion of sounds drawing the cooks attention. But if your lockpicking check as opposed to your stealth check causes the sound then that would be an issue. If either of lockpicking or stealth checks causes the cook to be there where success would not have, then that’s another issue.

Being able to move quietly or hide in shadows doesn't realistically make your attempt at picking locks quieter, though. It's still (probably) metal picks clinking against a (probably) metal lock.

Admittedly, this is a problem with Dexterity being a combo of both gross and fine motor skills, despite those being very different things.