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

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Once you start down that road pretty much all the traditional D&D attributes can seem too lumpy.

 

[Enrahim]

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.

I still really do not get what you are trying to say.

Map and key task resolution also works very well on larger scales. Hex crawl is as map and key as you get. And the standard dungeon turn is 10 minutes. It is not like moment to moment play is what this style of play was originally designed for. Your court scene could trivially be resolved by a 3 way diplomacy check representing 2 days of heavy negotiation. And it can be easily broken down to any granularity desired by the group within the task based framework.

So it seem like what you are saying is quite damning about the alternative approaches. At least if they are not able to handle moment to moment play (which task based resolution does), you really need to make the case for how they are significantly better than task based in high context situations for it to realy sound meaningful to consider it at all?

But then you advertise "Active scene framing". I do not know what you put in that word? Does it differ significantly from:
Players: We want to stay awake outside the assassin cell hoping they might talk in sleep and reveal some hints.
DM: OK, do you want to get the prisson chief to let you in, or do you maybe want a more sneaky approach?
Players: Let us try the chief first
DM: You enter a sparsly furnished office...

And if so, can you explain how it helps for this more complex situation?

(My Google found only examples consistent with the above exchange, like Scene Based Play | blogs and The Art of Pacing – Part 2: Scene-Framing and maybe most relevantly

Scene Framing

Scene Framing

indie-rpgs.com

I absolutely fail to see how this require a lot of context, how this is superior with active NPCs, and most importantly how this differs in any way from all out of dungeon D&D play I have ever experienced since I started in the mid 90s? EDIT: Oh, I sort of did a minor hex crawl once, but that also was almost reduced to fast travel between scenes or dungeons)

 

[Gimby]

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

Sorry, should have clarified, the detail of this analysis is really only relevant from 3e onwards where both the attacker and defenders stats matter for spell saves. You could extend it to 1/2e style by making the caster roll against a save target with no bonuses though.

Essentially, the idea here is that the action of rolling the die is completely irrelevant to the resulting fiction - it might give some people a feeling of control or being the actor, but assuming fair dice it doesn't matter to the fictional or mechanical outcome who actually rolls the die. Note for example the occasional GM who rolls all the dice, even for player saves which is a style mentioned going back a long way (I'll note it's not something I think is a good idea, just that it exists)

 

[FrogReaver]

I think you agree that this problem is of a much less severity than the appearing cook though? After all I guess you agree it is not completely unreasonable that the thief's general skill with thief tools might include how to prevent the various picks to rattle against each other, and to smoothly pack everything back together without sound?

Okay. I’m not ready to commit but let’s explore this. Skill with thieves tools means both skill at picking locks and skill at being silent with them. Then we need some way to differentiate the possible outcomes of pick the lock only but make noise, stay silent while attempting to pick but don’t make noise, both stay silent and pick the lock, don’t stay silent or pick the lock. If that’s what the skill represents then rolling the skill should resolve which of those possible outcomes we end up in. In the proposed example it doesn’t. There was 1 successful thieves tools roll which only has 2 possible outcomes when we need 4.

It is tricky. While that is certanly a very common feature, I do not really know if it is neccessary given the definitions - at least not to the extent normally associated with it. Genre emulation sim play for instance often would feature things that might not make perfect "independent world" sense. Like the bomb having exactly 1 minute left on it when it is found after several hours of search.

I think genre sim works fine with independent world. You just weight probabilities toward the outcomes the genre demands.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sorry, should have clarified, the detail of this analysis is really only relevant from 3e onwards where both the attacker and defenders stats matter for spell saves. You could extend it to 1/2e style by making the caster roll against a save target with no bonuses though.

Essentially, the idea here is that the action of rolling the die is completely irrelevant to the resulting fiction - it might give some people a feeling of control or being the actor, but assuming fair dice it doesn't matter to the fictional or mechanical outcome who actually rolls the die. Note for example the occasional GM who rolls all the dice, even for player saves which is a style mentioned going back a long way (I'll note it's not something I think is a good idea, just that it exists)

I'm just saying chasing down the parallels to to-hit are probably not a useful road to go. Your general point isn't unsound, but that specific argument doesn't necessarily end up there.

Like a lot of things in D&Doids, its hard to discuss because what the mechanics are really trying to represent can be pretty opaque in many cases.

 

[Campbell]

What I'm speaking to is what sort of fiction different approaches are most well suited to.

Task resolution is much more well suited to the sorts of fictional situation where player characters are outside actors, where the setting is not actively acting upon them in the here and now. Where changes in the environment mostly happen in response to the player characters' actions.

Conflict resolution and scene framing is much more suited to the sorts of fiction where the environment is constantly changing, and the player characters are being acted upon. The processes of a game like Apocalypse World are tuned to are all about how to make this sort of situation feel visceral and immediate. We move the spotlight around, force players to react and most importantly telegraph how their actions could change the dynamic situation. It provides a mental framework to make this sort of fiction both fair and immediate and makes it something we can all fit inside our heads without zooming out to some abstract faction stuff or domain management system where we are taking turns. Real visceral conflict that makes you feel like you are there as your character.

That's what Apocalypse World is all about. Immediacy of potentially violent situations and how do you all pull together and fall apart within them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

No, not at all. You can trivially change who rolls and produce identical results and identical fiction. The only difference is a rules widget.

-Edit

To expand, if we take a 3.5 Fireball with a DC of 16 against a target with a Reflex Save of +5, we get a 50% chance of saving and doing 50% damage due to a save. If we invert it to defences and attack rolls based on the "Players Roll all the Dice" section of the 3e Unearthed Arcana to a Reflex Defence of 15 and a Spell Attack of +5, we get a 50% chance of doing 50% damage on a miss. It is identical aside from who rolls the dice

-Edit Edit,

To be clear, I'm not saying you can't or have a preference for the rules widget you are most familiar or comfortable with, but as I hope I've shown, the fiction is irrelevant.

Irrelevant by what metric? Just because you can get same mechanical effect via another means does not mean the fiction is irrelevant.

Honestly I'm having a hard time even processing this response.

 

[Maxperson]

This is especially important, if we're actually looking at how play works. It's obvious that many elements of the fiction, which must "exist" in the fiction (eg grass must have some or other length; the sky must have some or other colour; if there are clouds, they must have some or other shape) but they don't get narrated. They can't be.

They can be and are. In my game there is no retrofitting of the terrain to fit in an encounter.

 

[Gimby]

Irrelevant by what metric? Just because you can get same mechanical effect via another means does not mean the fiction is irrelevant.

Honestly I'm having a hard time even processing this response.

You claimed that there was a difference between Save for Half and Damage on a Miss based on the fiction. I demonstrated that this wasn't true based on the Fireball example - the only difference was whose hand the die left and a reshuffling of the bonuses and target numbers - the fictional cause and range of results were identical in both cases. We can extend this to any reduced but not zero effect based on the randomiser coming up in a specific range. Who rolls it, which is really the only mechanical difference between saves and defences is irrelevant to both the fictional cause and the fictional result - it exists only in the real world, not in the fiction.

Of course, I'm not saying you can't prefer a separation or that perhaps this particular rules widget is more immersive to you (as others have stated, it helps them to imagine they are the active party) but the point is that the physical action of rolling a die (not interpreting the results, just physically rolling it) is irrelevant to the fictional state and inversely, the fiction does not state who in the real world should be rolling a die.

 

[Enrahim]

I think genre sim works fine with independent world. You just weight probabilities toward the outcomes the genre demands.

In that case, are you sure there are no genres characterised by the protagonist being chased around by screaming household members every time they mess something up? It just strike me as something that is such an obvious hilarious picture it should be a comedy trope