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

[The Firebird]

Unless of course the attempt to lock pick attracts unwanted attention. Then, it absolutely may.

This insistence that these things are not… and cannot be… connected is, I think, an unfortunate side effect of trying to treat the world as “independent”.

Why would a lock picker and a person who may hear the lockpicking be independent of one another?

There's no insistence that these things can't be connected...people have repeatedly stated they are ok with it when the noise alerts an already existing cook. Casting the complaint like that makes it seem ridiculous but doesn't engage with the actual concern...which is the cook's existence.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Bad things happening more often to the unskilled?!?! What kind of insanity is that?!?!



Sure… because attracting attention is a risk of picking a lock.




What if they were applying a related skill? Something like Wilderness or Survival?



Unless of course the attempt to lock pick attracts unwanted attention. Then, it absolutely may.

This insistence that these things are not… and cannot be… connected is, I think, an unfortunate side effect of trying to treat the world as “independent”.

Why would a lock picker and a person who may hear the lockpicking be independent of one another?



This makes no sense.



That’s not at all how I read that. I said it’s about the thief’s skill… not specifically about their lockpicking skill. Stealth is just another skill.

I’d personally combine them because I’d view picking a lock quietly more as a test of one’s lockpicking, but that’s just me.



I think it has a lot more to do with the common point of play, as stated in the second paragraph from @Enrahim below:



If the exploration of setting is central to play, that is a game I’d call G-driven. The setting is paramount, and the setting is the purview of the GM. As many have pointed out, the players are expected to be very limited in how they shape the events of play… just look at the cook example.

If a player roll determines the presence of the cook? Outrage.

If the GM rolls for it or even just decides that’s what happens? Total acceptance.

The “independence” of the world must be maintained because that’s the GM’s material.

It's because said independence is a goal of play, not specifically because it came from the GM. You're trying to inject an "Us vs. Them" element into this that doesn't have to be there.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is incredibly interesting! And I think this might be a good time to bring up my idea of "proto-games" as a way to describe a play experience. The idea is to take a desired component of a play experience and try to find the simplest activity that could provide that spesific experience. This could be for instance go for the tactical-strategic experience, trimmed down werewolf for social deduction, improv acting for acting in character, reading a book for experiencing independent fiction, Conway's game of life for seeing how a system interestingly react to input, conch passing for experiencing colaborative storytelling, black jack for push your luck.

A great game combines these experiences into something that is greater than the sum of it's parts. But they usually include some, and exclude others.

Inspectre is interesting as you point to it being close to a proto game for a lot of PbtA play. But you also point to that these games despite being quite tightly designed support a different mode of play well illustrated by other games (that unfortunately is a lot more compex, and hence harder to understand as "proto-games" in the sense I indicated above). I think this might be a more effective way to talk about game experiences than to reference back to the somewhat problematic broad and often poorly understood terms like "Narrativist".

You have to be careful here, there are deep differences between Inspectres, a shared storytelling game, and Apocalypse World! In AW all World authoring is the responsibility of the GM. The GM has pretty strict rules and guidelines about how and when and what to author, including deferring to the players, but it is not a system where different people alternate telling stuff about the world. Nor is that the core of what makes a game Narrativist, Baker defines 4 criteria for that IIRC. I think that was a pretty solid definition.

 

[hawkeyefan]

There's no insistence that these things can't be connected...people have repeatedly stated they are ok with it when the noise alerts an already existing cook. Casting the complaint like that makes it seem ridiculous but doesn't engage with the actual concern...which is the cook's existence.

All the comments I keep seeing are about the cook’s presence in the kitchen. That she’s “be there either way” and the like.

Her existence is implied by the kitchen, no?

It's because said independence is a goal of play, not specifically because it came from the GM. You're trying to inject an "Us vs. Them" element into this that doesn't have to be there.

No, I’m explaining why I consider this kind of play to be very GM-driven, and why I expect @pemerton does as well.

That in no way makes it bad. It’s a perfectly fine way to play, and the vast majority of my RPGing experience has been with such play. I’ve made lifetime friends because of such play.

But having exposed myself to more types if play… having broadened my understanding of what RPGs can do… has made me realize how GM-driven it is.

I know not everyone sees it that way, and that’s fine. But I also note that the ones who tend not to see it that way are also mostly the folks who only want to play that way.

 

[Maxperson]

The reason I ask is because I find roll under systems feel subjective to PCs, like if in D&D a GM changed the DC based on who was attempting the action. I was curious as to where people found the dividing line on the objectivity of the world.

I don't see roll under systems that way. It's not so much different DCs based on who is attempting it, but more like on PC having more skill than another. So if someone had a 10 in a stat and had to roll under it on 2d6, he would be more skilled than the guy with 7 in that same stat and had to roll under it on 2d6. It's just a different way to represent skill.

 

[Enrahim]

Bad things happening more often to the unskilled?!?! What kind of insanity is that?!?!

Bad things that has nothing to do with the lack of skill is a bit weird. Like the extremely unskilled cook somehow getting struck by lightning every time they burn the sauce.

Sure… because attracting attention is a risk of picking a lock.

How many times must it be stated that drawing attention is not a problem for most of us? It is conjuring the cook that is the problem. How do we know that the failure conjures the cook? Because it say in the example that we know there would be no cook on success.

What if they were applying a related skill? Something like Wilderness or Survival?

This is a relevant point that got expanded on in my conversation with @EzekielRaiden

Yes, I was noticing this. I hence updated my post slightly, but you replied too quickly! (Thank you by the way). I think this is really an interesting topic! In the wilderness it might for instance make perfect sense to adjust the encounter rate with survival skill based on if the group try to find or avoid encounters.

So the issue is clearly even more nuanced than who rolls the dice, and what factors into the roll. In my edit I threw out "unrelated" and more than one thing hinging on a single roll as possible nuances of importance, but this rings hollow. It is too simple, and I am sure there are important counter examples; like if entering a part of the dungeon that is random generated on the fly, then the result of orcs as wandering monster might also determine that there are going to be an orc lair nearby without that ticking off anyone.

The best fallback I can find is the concept of "weird". We are having an outcome that is connected with either a skill bonus, or another outcome that seem like it should be unrelated. Like the pick lock skill seem related to if it is picked before a guard show up, but seem unrelated to if the cook happens to have started preparing breakfast half an hour ago.

And that boils down to a sort of subjective notion. If something make you go "huh, that doesnt feel right" then that is a moment that calls for suspension of disbelief. In a living world setting this is moments we want to minimise, so employing a technique that is known to at least for some make them go "huh?" Seem ill adviceable.

I think a rule of thumb of not having a roll affecting more than one as isolated thing as possible within the granularity level of the described actions is a good advice in this regard. This should make it easy to relate modifier to effect, and there are no correlations that could be weird. Breaking this rule of thumb should be done with preventing any correlations that could be seen as weird in mind, but can make sense some times.

Unless of course the attempt to lock pick attracts unwanted attention. Then, it absolutely may.

This insistence that these things are not… and cannot be… connected is, I think, an unfortunate side effect of trying to treat the world as “independent”.

Why would a lock picker and a person who may hear the lockpicking be independent of one another?

This doesn't make sense? We are not talking about dependencies between fictional characters at all? If you talk about why the probability of there being someone around to hear the lock picking being independent of the outcome of the lockpicking attempt the answer is that there are no obvious causal in-fiction mechanism that could connect these and hence the mind expect these to not be correlated. If the mind register that they indeed do correlate, it will start searching for causality mechanisms, like common cause for both events. Stopping the mind from doing so is called "suspension of disbelief" and is something we want to keep to a minimum in the kind of games many here like to play.

<snip>
I think it has a lot more to do with the common point of play, as stated in the second paragraph from @Enrahim below:



If the exploration of setting is central to play, that is a game I’d call G-driven. The setting is paramount, and the setting is the purview of the GM. As many have pointed out, the players are expected to be very limited in how they shape the events of play… just look at the cook example.

If a player roll determines the presence of the cook? Outrage.

If the GM rolls for it or even just decides that’s what happens? Total acceptance.

The “independence” of the world must be maintained because that’s the GM’s material.

Ok, I think I now might have gitten sufficient understanding to have a shot at introducing a less inflammatory terminology. Instead of GM-driven or GM-centric play, I think GM-provided play covers this concept you seem to describe much better, while being much less prone for inflammatory interpretation. I think no trad GM will feel insulted by it being insinuated that they provide the toys the players play with. They will however be insulted by it being insinuated that they for instance take a driving position on how the players play with these toys or that somehow the play revolve around them personally rather than the player's interaction with the toys they have provided.

 

[FrogReaver]

The reason I ask is because I find roll under systems feel subjective to PCs, like if in D&D a GM changed the DC based on who was attempting the action. I was curious as to where people found the dividing line on the objectivity of the world.

I don’t have a problem with the dm changing dc based on who is doing the action though.

 

[Lanefan]

So DMs never factor in, for example, the party's stealthiness for what results might come up on a wandering monster roll? I can literally say I have seen more than one DM apply such a thing (e.g. the party scout's Stealth bonus reducing the result of a wandering-encounter roll so that lesser or even empty encounters are more likely). So like...even that isn't the absolute hard-and-fast line you seem to think it is.

If the dice come up "encounter" then there's an encounter; the party's stealth then has a lot to say about the course that encounter takes and-or whether it is completely bypassed.

DM: <on rolling a random encounter> "On your quiet way through the forest you notice a Dire Wolf not far ahead, on a low ridge. It clearly hasn't noticed you yet."
Player(s): "We back off a bit then sneak around it on the downwind side."
DM: <does a bit of rolling> "Looks good - you're past the wolf and it still hasn't noticed you. Carry on."

 

[Maxperson]

I think this is pretty common - Save for Half is, essentially, identical to Damage on a Miss - the only difference is who rolls the dice

Yeah. I mentioned this in a different thread recently. Damage on a miss with weapons bugs the hell out of me, but damage on a miss with spells is perfectly fine. I'm not sure if that's because it's how it was back during 1e when I started playing, or maybe it's because magic, or maybe something else. I do recognize the inconsistency in me there, though.

 

[Gimby]

I think most are coupling the interpretative part into this. There is a difference or at least potentially so there. A miss entails something different than you are in the area so will be hit but can potentially maneuver to take less of the hit.

Sure, but mechanically all a miss means is that you didn't reach the target number on the die - you can absolutely shuffle who rolls and what bonuses apply to what target to make the 3e+ save system into an attack vs defence system that has misses in it. At which point, save for half becomes exactly damage on a miss (as I hope I've established, this reshuffling doesn't impact the input or resulting fiction at all, just purely the administration). I fully accept it might affect immersion (as I say, rolling may make you feel like more of an active participant) though if so I wonder how people who feel that way would respond to active defence rolls vs static attack values for AC based attacks (essentially converting AC into another save)