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

[hawkeyefan]

That's been a sticking point with me as well. 5e bundles too much together. My desert nomad who has never been in enough water to swim in is a master swimmer because I picked athletics so he could climb well. I can't have a PC who can't see well, but has other good senses.

Sure… whether such bundling is good or not is a matter of preference. But it’s very present in 5e. I suppose you could at least take a Flaw that you can’t swim… and grab Inspiration when swimming comes up… but they did away with BIFTs, didn’t they?

 

[Maxperson]

Again, there's a huge excluded middle here between fill in all the details for everything and provide ANY details at all. I'm not deciding which details are important because D&D provides absolutely NO details to compare. All the details are generated by the DM. Which is perfectly fair. You like gamist games. That's great. D&D has long been very gamist and glories in that.

Any simulation you have is 100% being generated by the DM after the fact. Again, perfectly fine. I like that too. I'm just not going to pretend that D&D is somehow simulating anything. It really, really isn't.

D&D doesn't provide specific details, but it does provide framework in which the DM's details have to fit. When the simulated swordsman swings the simulated longsword at the orc and misses, the DM has to narrate some sort of sword swing and a miss. He can't narrate fairies coming to sing Girls Just Wanna Have Fun instead.

 

[Maxperson]

Sure… whether such bundling is good or not is a matter of preference. But it’s very present in 5e. I suppose you could at least take a Flaw that you can’t swim… and grab Inspiration when swimming comes up… but they did away with BIFTs, didn’t they?

Yeah, which I viewed as a fairly big step backwards. Those were really great roleplaying aids, especially for new players. I'm not sure you could take a flaw that did that, though. Flaws didn't have mechanical impact like that, which means that the PC would still be a great swimmer. The flaw would have to be something like a fear of water or something where the PC wouldn't want to get in, but if forced to he'd be amazing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm confused re: the bolded bit. In narrative games, there very often is independence from the player--that's why there are countdowns and fronts and situations that exist independently from the players, created by the GM. You've said you've played Monster of the Week, right? Each adventure has a six-step countdown, labeled Day to Midnight, that does exactly that. Maybe not every narrative game has them, but a lot of them do. So I still don't understand what the problem is.

Well, I didn't GM Monster of the Week, and the GM was a good illusionist. Most of my issues with that game involved the whole "special, unique PC" thing and the cute names for all the PC abilities, both exemplified by the Playbook.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Well, it is being changed...but I'll accept your terminology because nothing hinges on it, imo. I don't like play that authors key details of the world as a result of player skill checks because it inappropriately mixes the players actions with the world.

“Inappropriately”? The player action is rolling dice.

Do players not typically roll dice to affect the fictional world?

The player hoping it was something dictated that it was the thing they hoped for because they succeeded. They shaped the world to what they wanted because of a good roll.

A player got what they wanted because of a good roll?!?!

Lunacy! Absolute lunacy, I say!!!

There's no point because its obvious to me it can be viewed as a simulation because I do. But I'm not ever going to convince you so I don't really see the point.

Well it’s obvious to me that it’s Jell-o because I view it as Jell-o!

Yeah, this is one point of disconnect. If the players in your game are not trying to win, if the social contract underlying it says that trying to win is bad form--then yeah, that's part of why it doesn't appeal to me. In a narrative system "playing to win" clashes with the feeling of immersion. This is why I say that, for me, narrative games don't feel like games. They feel like they are about telling a story.

“Playing to win” doesn’t need to clash with immersion at all. I don’t know where you’d even get that idea from.

Plenty of games work perfectly fine when the players are simply advocating for their characters… trying to “win” by getting the characters what they want.

I don’t know how that would conflict with immersion.

A satisfying conclusion to the story being told.

And what makes you say that?

 

[Maxperson]

Really? 1 in 6 chance is "fixed" world? How? The presence of the guard is totally arbitrary. It's a 16 percent chance. Doesn't matter what the players do or what's going on in the world. It's totally arbitrary. So, how is it that any different than the percentage chance of a failed check?

See, the problem is, you think that the die roll is actually tied to the game world. That the die roll results are somehow changing the world after the fact. But, they aren't. The fiction hasn't been established yet, so, the presence of the guard or the cook is unknown until the DM uses some method to determine it. The DM could use a random 1 in X chance. Could use a failed (or successful) check. Could trigger the first time someone uses a Monty Python quote around the table. It's all 100% arbitrary and has nothing to do with anything in the game. There is no fixed world.

Note, the unstable rocks you added after the fact. The DC wasn't set by the presence of unstable rocks. The rocks became unstable as a result of the failed check. Please stop trying to rewrite examples.

It's not arbitrary. The guard patrols the house at a walking pace. There are X number of rooms and it takes Y time to walk them all. Then it's just math to figure out the approximate likelihood of being in any given room when the PCs arrive. So the DM rolls before they get there and knows that the guard is in the library when the lockpicking is going on. The guard won't be in the kitchen at all, because he's in the library, and the players roll can't alter that, because the lockpicking roll is irrelevant to where the guard is, unlike the roll that decided which room the guard was in.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Yeah, which I viewed as a fairly big step backwards. Those were really great roleplaying aids, especially for new players. I'm not sure you could take a flaw that did that, though. Flaws didn't have mechanical impact like that, which means that the PC would still be a great swimmer. The flaw would have to be something like a fear of water or something where the PC wouldn't want to get in, but if forced to he'd be amazing.

Sure, but if swimming came up you could just refuse to have the character try it. Or if it was unavoidable (like if the PC somehow fell into the water) you could request to roll with disadvantage because of the flaw. Something like that.

 

[Maxperson]

The degree of detail GMs describe can, however, vary considerably. I wouldn't be in the least surprised to hear a GM say "The cliff looks like a rough climb" without going into more detail, especially if the climb is incidental.

Rough to climb takes crumbling rocks into account. It's not adding in a detail retroactively to have a rock crumble under the climbers weight if he fails the roll. Plus if the player really wanted to, he could have examined the cliff to get more detail.

 

[Micah Sweet]

GURPS?

I played GURPS, once upon a time, with my old group. Good system.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It's not arbitrary. The guard patrols the house at a walking pace. There are X number of rooms and it takes Y time to walk them all. Then it's just math to figure out the approximate likelihood of being in any given room when the PCs arrive. So the DM rolls before they get there and knows that the guard is in the library when the lockpicking is going on. The guard won't be in the kitchen at all, because he's in the library, and the players roll can't alter that, because the lockpicking roll is irrelevant to where the guard is, unlike the roll that decided which room the guard was in.

This honestly doesn’t sound like any kind of random encounter roll I’ve ever heard of. I’ve never seen a breakdown of the timing according to the overall space of the location and determining where else they are.

It’s just are they in the location of the PCs or not.

Y’all are working on some advanced calculus to figure all this stuff out! Just roll some dice, people!