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

[Maxperson]

I don’t know if that’s true. Most rolls in the games I’m thinking of are made by a player and are about their character affecting the world.

That's what I said. The character is a buffer between the player's roll and the affect in the world. The player is rolling, but it's the character who is affecting the world.

They often may also indicate some consequence to the character in response to their action.

What rolls are you thinking of that “skip that buffer”? And what do you think it is that makes this buffer important?

I think anytime you are playing a game and the player is authoring world content, that skips the buffer. I imagine at least some of the game that do that involve rolling something.

The buffer is important to folks who are more traditional since the player directly authoring things in the world isn't very traditional. It's just playstyle preference is all.

 

[Maxperson]

These sound like some quantum crumbling rocks to me!

See my description upthread about how such a climb usually comes about.

 

[clearstream]

That's not quite right.

There's no problem in the DM adding in the narration. That's perfectly fine and totally understandable in the case of D&D.

I'm arguing against the idea that the D&D rules are any sort of simulation. Since the mechanics don't inform the narrative in any meaningful way, all narrative is generated by the DM and not by the rules. Thus, any notion of simulation comes from the DM and not the mechanics themselves. IOW, for a game to be considered to be a simulation, the game itself has to inform the narrative in some meaningful way.

I think you should have gone with "that's right" as you've just restated a formalist position.

It's not a criticism. More a question; do you count the game played if the players go beyond what is instructed by the rules? What about if one of the rules instructs them to go beyond the other rules?

To me, excluding the consequences of DM as you have fails to see how D&D is played. Seeing as I think you know how D&D is played, I think that you must be in some way circumscribing those consequences: hence, formalism.

None of this refers to the game as being meaningful or is even a remote judgement on the game itself. It's a judgement on the idea that D&D is some sort of simulation.

You seem to be excluding simulationist meanings from among meanings. You're saying the game has meaning, but not that meaning. It might be that you adopt a formalist stance only toward simulationist game play. Is that right? Why is it singled out?

 

[clearstream]

I don't think this is right at all.

What @Hussar is expressing is a classic "mechanical simulationist" viewpoint. From [urk=[URL="https://www.arkenstonepublishing.net/isabout/2020/05/14/observations-on-gns-simulationism/#13-mechanical-simulation]Tuovinen's"]Observations on GNS Simulationism – Correspondence is about Diligence[/URL] blog[/url]:

“Mechanical simulation” means having the players expend significant time and effort quantifying, formalizing and then calculating outcomes for all sorts of fictional things. The enjoyment is in witnessing the mathematical structure of the game engine in action, and its dance with the game fiction.​

In RuneQuest, when an attack is made we know whether or not it was parried/dodged (the attack/parry dice tell us that), and if it hits where the opponent was struck (the hit location die tells us that) and what effect the strike had on the opponent (the damage dice, in conjunction with the rules for the effects of damage on body parts, tells us that).

The contrast with D&D hp combat is in my view very striking. It's why games like RQ and RM have the mechanics that they have: so that the process of resolution also actually tells us what is happening in the fiction.

You could be right that @Hussar was focused on just that one of the six things Tuovinen listed that a game can do. I had understood them to still be working with the broader label.

Tuovinen doesn't mean that a game must do every one of the six things to be counted simulationist, so there's no pressing need to defend D&D as mechanical simulation if it's his model I'm to have in mind.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I think the real issue here is: people's brains work differently (but people assume that everyone else's brain works the same as theirs does).

Let me explain. We had a discussion on Aphantasia a while back. And we actually found that amongst the small sample of people taking part in the discussion there was a wide variation in ability to create mental images, with regards to colour, detail, etc. I have come to understand that I am exceptionally good at creating mental images. To the extent that my D&D worldbuilding largely consists of mental images. I actually write down very little (being dyslexic). But the worldbuilding is highly detailed, in my mind. Thus, if a player asks me "what colour is coat is Bert wearing?" I can answer it, not because I am making it up on the spot, but because I have a mental image of Bert in my minds eye, which I can look at and and answer the question (it's brown, with fur trim).

I have become increasingly aware that my ability is unusual. Last year I was tutoring a student, and whilst talking about pressure I asked them to imagine an elephant. They told me that they could not, and explained that they had Aphanasia. So I asked them to draw an elephant, which they did. But that elephant quite literally did not exist for my student until it was drawn.

 

[pemerton]

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.

Yes. The player affected the content of the fiction. That's what happens in a RPG.

That's vastly different than a GM filling in a few details that have no mechanical impact on the state of the game.

For a start, it's not GM-driven!

 

[pemerton]

I'm looking for a game world that feels real, like my character is in a fantasy novel or movie.

So am I. I think trying to use aspirations for an experience to describe particular techniques and processes is not that helpful.

 

[pemerton]

Surprise depends on passive perception beating the DC of the roll of the stealth. So passive perception is the king here.

Let me ask you this. What if there is no stealth roll? Passive numbers are used to represent the average of an act that is constantly being performed. If a group is trying to be stealthy the entire day as it travels, the rules allow the DM to just use passive stealth. In fact, the way the rules are written, there should be no roll and it should be treated passively like perception.

Does surprise depend on a stealth roll then?

If you are comparing two fixed values - passive WIS (Perception) and passive DEX (Stealth) - then obviously no roll is being made.

My intuition is that not many D&D tables do surprise this way, though.

 

[pemerton]

The rock is pre-established and is there whether they climb or not.

So just to be clear: you map out all the ledges and protuberances, and whether or not they will bear a PC's weight, and ask the player to plot their PC's course?

 

[Enrahim]

Yes. The player affected the content of the fiction. That's what happens in a RPG.

The player affected the content of the fiction via different means than describing an action made by their character and having the effect of that propagate via in fiction causality mechanisms. That is not something that happen in all RPGs.