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

[Micah Sweet]

I should probably just add that to my tagline - I sometimes forget to add it.

No worries. I just know it's very easy to take someone's opinion about what they like that involves contrast and interpret it as an attack on what they don't.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Ok, this is a good start.


But, I think you are missing the point of why we're choosing this example. It's illustrating an extreme case to show that the principles behind the technique are not, in our opinion, sound. The GM is trying to create an illusion of verisimilitude--but they are doing so without relying on a fixed world backdrop. For me, once I realized this as a player nothing the GM can do can give me the feeling of verisimilitude, even if they are making sensical decisions all the time. It feels fake.


So while I am sure this works for you, it doesn't, and cannot, work for me.

But the same can happen in trad games.

Godzilla pops out of a closet! Therefore, trad gaming is not verisimilitudinous! Therefore, it cannot work for you.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But the same can happen in trad games.

Godzilla pops out of a closet! Therefore, trad gaming is not verisimilitudinous! Therefore, it cannot work for you.

Perhaps we can accept that any technique can be taken to extremes considered ridiculous even by the technique's proponents, but where that extreme lies is unique to the individual.

 

[hawkeyefan]

See next comment

Then everyone agrees! It is just you sort of making a fool of yourself thinking the rest of us are talking about the fixed example, when you are the only one actually doing so.

A fool of myself? Okay, sparky.

See above. Indeed why would any GM do that? Ask those that has kept defending the original example, insisting they cannot seee the problem with the conjuration. This is not you.

See above. It seem like you might have been misreading the last few hundred of pages. What has actually happened has been a pushback against an example you yourself describe as flawed. It has nothing about what rolls players do, it has always been about the problem of narrating an unrelated consequence. Indeed what is being called out is that the GM in this original example overstepped their responsibilities.

I don't think so. What's happening is that you are all criticizing the method by attacking the flawed example. If you are not attacking the valid example... the one you call "fixed"... then you're acknowledging that the method works perfectly fine.

And there we are back. "The GM could choose to narrate things that don't make sense." This is the problem this tread has been all about. They cannot honestly make this choice in trad task resolution.

Of course they can.

And further "But why would they do so?" Because the system require them to come up with something dramatic to push the story forward. "Why would a GM instead not try to come up with sensible events?" Who said they didn't try? In the heat of the moment it is hard to solve the puzzle of comming up with something that is both really dramatic and fully sensible in light of complicated and subtle relations like comparing with what you would have narrated on success. This has been done in a couple of seconds. It is not like you are quietly sitting on your own pondering the finer details of a prewritten adventure for hours in this game!

Right, this is why people have pointed out it is a different skill set.

If folks were saying "I don't like fail forward because it forces me as a GM to be creative in a more immediate manner" then I would say that you have a point. But I don't think people want to frame it that way because it's an admission of some kind of shortcoming as a GM... so it's far easier to criticize the method about how it can result in absurd outcomes.

Nope, this twist ha been attempted before. This is not about scene framing, it is and has always been about the kitchen being empty on success and the GM creating a fully new previously unestablished NPC in the kitchen in the middle of an activity on failure.

But 5e and many similar games give the GM the authority to do that any time they want. So why does your criticism not apply to that game as well?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Braunstein required a fair bit of prep and intro from the GM to get things going, but (when I played it, anyway, with Wesely as GM) once play began the GM pretty much just sat there and did nothing the whole time other than watch. Afterwards, he gave a five-minute rundown of what we'd done right in-character and what we'd missed.

Modern games seem to want to reduce the GM's prep and intro work while increasing the during-play work, which seems kinda net-zero to me.

Well, I defer to your direct experience, though I would also assume Wesley has literally run the same scenario or very similar ones literally 1000's of times at this point. Presumably every single thing that can come up in 99% of games has already been accounted for. Sort of like if I ran B2 1000 times!

Didn't Dave describe his runs of that as being pretty hectic?

 

[AlViking]

A fool of myself? Okay, sparky.



I don't think so. What's happening is that you are all criticizing the method by attacking the flawed example. If you are not attacking the valid example... the one you call "fixed"... then you're acknowledging that the method works perfectly fine.

If you think the example is flawed, feel free to provide a different example.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To clear the apparent confusion. There is a previously rolled stealth check that gets used to determine surprise but no rolls are occurring to determine surprise.

Example. PC rolls a 15 on stealth long before combat starts. The PC is trying to sneak through hostile territory. Combat begins. The DM compares that 15 to the passive perception of all enemies. That’s how surprise is determined.

In 5e surprise is directly a function of your parties stealthiness. There is no separate surprise roll.

Another fun 5e tidbit, surprise doesn’t occur if enemies notice even a single member of your party or the party a single enemy.

4e's approach was interesting. There's a rule for the effect of surprise, but no rules at all describe how it is achieved! Thus surprise is essentially a part of the fiction. Various sources have utilized Stealth, Bluff, and Intuition check results to act as a surprise check in different situations. Nature also seems like a legitimate possibility, maybe others in some situations. It could also be an outcome of an SC.

I always found that a fairly interesting design choice in a game which tends to like to codify things like unstructured skill use (and honestly those codifications seem like some of the weakest parts of the design).

 

[The Firebird]

But the same can happen in trad games.

Godzilla pops out of a closet! Therefore, trad gaming is not verisimilitudinous! Therefore, it cannot work for you.

It's true, that game would not work for me.

What I'd say is that trad gaming can work for me, under the condition that the GM is faithfully presenting a fixed world which they attempt to imbue with internal logic. If that logic isn't perfect by my standards, that's ok. If it's way off, no thanks.

Whereas narrative gaming cannot work for me because the GM definitionally does not present a fixed world. This is in fact the point of narrative gaming--you get fun scenarios like Pemerton's rune examples, the players feel more agency in constructing the plot, and so on. That's cool.

But it is different, and this difference prevents it from doing what I'm looking for.

I don't think so. What's happening is that you are all criticizing the method by attacking the flawed example. If you are not attacking the valid example... the one you call "fixed"... then you're acknowledging that the method works perfectly fine.

I don't think the method works perfectly fine...even your valid example permits a much narrower range of DM responses than takes place in these games. Look at Pemerton's runes--an actual play example, valid gameplay, fun for many people. But for me it breaks the illusion and so I won't enjoy it.

Right, this is why people have pointed out it is a different skill set.

If folks were saying "I don't like fail forward because it forces me as a GM to be creative in a more immediate manner" then I would say that you have a point. But I don't think people want to frame it that way because it's an admission of some kind of shortcoming as a GM... so it's far easier to criticize the method about how it can result in absurd outcomes.

I think this is a really tempting thought for people on your side, and I've heard it a few times..."I guess these folks just aren't experienced/creative/skilled enough to pull it off".

You can't test that without sitting at my table, I suppose. But I've run BitD campaigns that people loved, I've run Havoc Brigade and Lady Blackbird, I've implemented narrative mechanics in my 5e games. I've run whole sessions based on improv, and they've come off quite well, at least to my players. So in my view there is something more here.

 

[AlViking]

...
Right, this is why people have pointed out it is a different skill set.

If folks were saying "I don't like fail forward because it forces me as a GM to be creative in a more immediate manner" then I would say that you have a point. But I don't think people want to frame it that way because it's an admission of some kind of shortcoming as a GM... so it's far easier to criticize the method about how it can result in absurd outcomes.
..

Forcing the GM to be creative has nothing to do with why I don't like fail forward. It's about the fact that on a failure something that is not directly connected to the task being attempted occurs. Every once in a while it's bad luck and coincidence. Happens every time it's breaking my sense of verisimilitude even if it does not for you.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Pemerton is obviously describing a different game where a burglary skill would cover what would be multiple actions while also being quite specific for a breaking and entry. It might make sense in a game focused on a more specific genre and probably a narrative style of game.

D&D isn't that game it's an adventure game where picking a lock may have nothing at all to do with burglary, it's a very restricted action. Picking a lock may be part of a burglary but it's only going to be one step along the way, other skills and other characters are likely to have just as much or more impact on how the scenario unfolds. A burglary skill to me sounds like something used in a game that focuses on the story, not the adventure.

A burglary roll rolls up a lot of things into a bundle and implies a whole different approach from D&D. It's also not a "limitation" in any sense because a game that would include it is just trying to do something different. Whether or not D&D could consolidate it's skill list is a different issue, but a burglary skill would put the game in a whole different category. Perhaps in the game where burglary was a skill unlike D&D fail forward would be core to the rules of the game.

Interestingly, many of the skills in 5e do exactly what you're describing in regard to a "burglary skill".

I mean, Move Silently and Hide in Shadows used to be separate skills... now they're all covered by Stealth. Apparently, so would picking a lock quietly...

Listen and Spot used to be separate... now they're covered by Perception.

Climbing and Jumping and Lifting and so on.... Athletics.

Balance and Tumbling and so on... Acrobatics.

5e is already rife with these elements that are "focusing on the story, not the adventure", whatever that means.

I, and my players, have never had any real issue with imagining what is going on. Why should the game rules tell us why or how we fail a climb check? My character could be climbing a trellis, a crumbling castle wall, a cliff, a giant bean stalk, a giant. It doesn't matter, the description of what happens and why is up to the people at the table. D&D simulates a heroic fantasy fictional world.

Well, @Hussar 's point is that the mechanics dictating what happens is what would make it a simulation. So if they don't do that, they aren't simulating anything. He used harm to a specific part of the body as an example. D&D doesn't do that... it just says "you lose 12 hit points" which doesn't actually simulate anything.

I want to pull out this example, because I think it is even more clear than the cook one and comes from actual play. I get what you are trying to do it. But I don't think I can enjoy any game that uses this kind of adjudication. The problem is that nothing is fixed here--the player could just have easily made up that the runes were a protection spell, or some piece of history they wanted to introduce. And the only thing that determines whether the runes are a boon or a bane is a die roll.

This is exactly the failure we've been trying to get at with the cook example--on a good roll, the world is defined such that good things happen, on a bad one, the world is defined such that bad things do.

The runes are simultaneously good and bad until the die is rolled. No one knows, not even the GM. They are quantum runes.

Compare to a case where the players don't know what the runes are but the GM does know, because they are in the GMs notes. You see the difference?

This is what we are criticizing when we say this adjudication system is quantum or conjures stuff (beneficial or harmful runes) out of nothing or involves a disconnect between cause and effect. Here the cause is "the player rolled well to decipher the runes" with the result "the runes were beneficial".

Ignoring the use of "quantum" here, I'm just going to ask if, based on your description above and the importance it places on the GM and their notes, that perhaps you can see why some of us describe this style of game as being GM-driven or GM-focused.

Perhaps we can accept that any technique can be taken to extremes considered ridiculous even by the technique's proponents, but where that extreme lies is unique to the individual.

That's pretty much my point. I could point to absurd examples of trad play to point out how it fails or leads to absurd results... but why would I do that if I want to engage in honest debate?