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

[pemerton]

My point is that no GM that I’ve met or interacted with is capable of doing what’s being talked about in this thread… the tracking of the places of all NPCs at all times, the calculation of where a guard may be based on distances within a house, establishing ahead of time all the factors that may lead to a failed check.

That the GM has thought of everything ahead of time so that there is no need for deciding things in the moment of play.

I don’t believe that happens.

Agreed.

Considering he’s claiming that many of my games lack any kind of substance and that the actions taken by the players don’t matter… I think the point is rather ridiculous.

Right! The players' actions don't matter, because all they do is change or add to the shared fiction. To truly matter, they must reveal the content of the GM's notes.

 

[pemerton]

Yes, the player described an action. But they also expressed a hope. In this game this expression of hope turned out to be more potent than in many other games.

In mainstream D&D, if you hope for your PC to climb the cliff, and you then succeed at your roll, your hope comes true: the fiction now includes your PC at the top of the cliff.

What is different about (say) Cortex+ Heroic is what sorts of additions to the shared fiction can follow from action resolution.

A RPG in which the players hopes for what happened to their PCs had no effect would be a total railroad, wouldn't it? Because that would mean everything is being decided by someone else without reference to any desire or intention that a player has.

 

[clearstream]

No he didn't. But very few posters in this thread, or on ENW, follow Tuovinen'sa (or Edward's) usage when they talk about "simulationism".

Normally they mean some combination of "mechanical simulation" and "very strong GM control over backstory" and "neutrality by the GM in adjudication and narration).

@Hussar can correct me, but I doubt that he has read the Tuovinen blog.

The post I characterised as effectively formalist argued things like

It's not that it has to simulate reality. It's that a simulation has to simulate something. Anything. For something to be "Verisimiltudinous", the system has to actually inform the narrative. And in D&D, it never does. The system in no way tells you what happens. Combat is the easiest example, but, anything else works as well - skill checks, saving throws, anything. Nothing in the system actually informs the narrative.​

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If you fail a climb check, what happens? If you are at the bottom of the climb, then nothing happens. You simply do not move. Why did you fail the check? What caused the failure? Who knows? The system tells you nothing.​

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To say that "the system has to actually inform the narrative" is first of all to exclude from "system" the rule early in the PHB that "The DM Narrates the Results of the Adventurers’ Actions." Assuming such an exclusion were acceptable, it must then discount from game play any going beyond the rules by the players.

 

[Lanefan]

It doesn't.

The system has to be the one doing the lifting in order to be a simulation.

Not sure about this.

You could have a pretty simulative game come out of designing a setting then turning the players loose for systemless free-improv roleplay.

System can help, sure, but it's far from being the only determinant. The real thing that does the heavy lifting is the group of people at the table, because at the root any system is always just a dry set of rules and guidelines.

One table can take a system like D&D and make a very gamist experience out of it while another group can take the same system and make a very sim experience out of it. It just takes a variable degree of effort to achieve, as some systems make it easier than others to go in a particular direction.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

And if the players don't ask for more detail then should someone try to climb that cliff and fail the DM is free to narrate whatever she likes as the reason why. Crumbly rocks, unexpectedly slippery moss, poor hand/footholds or spaced too far apart, being startled by a bird flapping out of a hidden nest, or whatever.

If however the players do ask for more detail as to why the climb looks rough, they'll likely learn about the possibility of such hazards before setting out on the climb: "you see a lot of loose rock at the foot of the cliff", "it's hard to see the hand- and footholds because of some patches of thick moss", "part of the cliff looks quite sheer, and might not have any handholds", "looks like there's some bird nests in the cliff", etc.

 

[pemerton]

The post I characterised as effectively formalist argued things like

It's not that it has to simulate reality. It's that a simulation has to simulate something. Anything. For something to be "Verisimiltudinous", the system has to actually inform the narrative. And in D&D, it never does. The system in no way tells you what happens. Combat is the easiest example, but, anything else works as well - skill checks, saving throws, anything. Nothing in the system actually informs the narrative.​

​

If you fail a climb check, what happens? If you are at the bottom of the climb, then nothing happens. You simply do not move. Why did you fail the check? What caused the failure? Who knows? The system tells you nothing.​

​

To say that "the system has to actually inform the narrative" is first of all to exclude from "system" the rule early in the PHB that "The DM Narrates the Results of the Adventurers’ Actions." Assuming such an exclusion were acceptable, it must then discount from game play any going beyond the rules by the players.

@Hussar has not said anything about what counts as game play. And has not really expressed any serious view as to what counts as a rule. What he has said is that, in D&D, the process of mechanical resolution typically does not specify what has happened in the fiction to bring about some particular result. With the poster child for this being - unsurprisingly - hit points.

You said that:

Formalism says that the game is only played if it is played according to its rules.

And Husssar, as I said, has not said anything about what counts as playing D&D. Though he has strongly implied that (i) he thinks that adding in narration which the mechanical process of resolution neither yields nor requires is part of playing the game, and (ii) that it is fun:

The "fluff" is 100% generated by the DM. The Dm could easily not mention the crumbling rock and it would make no difference. In other words, the system is not informing the narrative at all.

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

Wow! I think you just accurately described why D&D is the best system I have found for me so far <3

And that is perfectly fine. Hell, I totally agree.

 

[Lanefan]

I ran a 5e game this weekend. The PCs had to climb a cliff to reach their goal. A ritual was being performed in that location, one which they hoped to stop.

One of the PCs failed his climb check. I didn’t narrate that he fell or was stuck halfway up or that he needed to make a saving throw or a new climb check or anything like that.

I ruled that the climb took longer than they hoped and so the ritual was further along toward completion.

Which while I'm sure this worked for you in the moment, is also a direct violation of the integrity of the roll.

The roll said the climber failed. You turned around and narrated success that took a bit longer.

And this is my entire argument against fail forward, both as a term and as a concept: that it's used like this, as an excuse to turn failure into success - as if they don't already succeed enough.

 

[clearstream]

The GM is filling in details all the time, adding a ridge or other minor detail is nothing unusual. I might describe a beautiful sunset just to add flavor.

Once again, adding flavorful fluff. The fall wasn't caused by the crumbling rock, the fall was caused by a failed athletics check. The crumbling rock was just adding flair.

The above is just filling in a bit of color, making the world come alive and had no impact at all on the actual game state.

(Emphasis mine.)

“The fall” is something that happens to the character… it’s a part of the fiction, and the reason for it should be part of the fiction.

The fall is not “caused” by the failed roll. I was pointing this out because attributing causal qualities in the fiction to events in the real world seems to happen a lot, and it’s an odd phenomenon.

I personally have no problem narrating such a thing after the fact. “Quantum crumbling rocks” we can call them. But there seems to be some pushback that trad GM’s “change” the fiction to fit the result. Not everyone who is advocating for trad play seems in agreement on this.

I found the part you called attention to very interesting. Setting aside the possibility that the poster didn't capture their intended meaning in what they wrote, it seems to exemplify the notion that the mechanic itself can stand for what happens in the fiction. It would match cases in detailed combat minigames for systems with simple-fail (in that context, at least) where misses receive no further narration.

I wondered whether the ability of game mechanics to stand in for language like this, means that they can supplement language i.e. count as sufficient narration of whatever they represent in the game world? Before excluding that out of hand, it should be obvious that the words "crumbling rocks" are no more the actual crumbling rocks than the mechanic is the struggle and failure to make progress up the wall. @AlViking seems to say that the mechanic says everything necessary to be said, while you seem to desire additional narration in the form of "crumbling rocks".

 

[Lanefan]

“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.

At a basic level, I agree with this. However...

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

....if getting what the characters want involves a lot of meta-play - e.g. acquiring and spending metacurrencies that don't exist in the fiction - that can hammer immersion pretty hard.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

As a starting point, perhaps, when the PCs arrive. But you then need to know how long it'll be before they are in the location the PCs are at, and having a timing breakdown for their patrols can be really useful for this if the PCs intend to stay in (or get stuck at) one place for any length of time.