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

[EzekielRaiden]

I view D&D from a sim perspective, pretty much every group I've played with the majority have. I don't recall people saying it's the best sim, just better than some.

What does "better than some" mean?

Because "some" can mean almost anything. Like, as long as you can find at least one (or, if someone is being a stickler, at least two) games that aren't as good, then that statement is true, but like...being better than the two worst possible examples isn't exactly a high bar to clear. The bar is through the floor for this.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Assuming the ship can be turned in time to miss the iceberg.

That's what did in the Titanic: the ship's design was such that it took so long to turn that, even with a competent helmsman putting the helm hard over on first warning, they still hit the iceberg anyway on a glancing - but deadly - angle. (subsequent analysis holds they'd probably have been better off had they not turned and instead hit it head on, but that's a different issue)

That the ship was going too fast for the conditions wasn't the helmsman's fault.

Not necessarily, see above.

As always, quibbles rather than engaging with the core point.

You're now declaring that this challenge never could have ever been resolved. So there would not have been a roll.

We are, I should think extremely obviously, talking about cases where a roll is in fact valid, where success can in fact occur.

When we strip out this obvious quibbling that is an alleged counterexample--when we look at situations that are not guaranteed failure--the point remains. I had not thought I needed to specify that guaranteed failure wasn't under consideration when we are already agreed that a roll is appropriate!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

First, they aren't probably moving about. Very few people are constantly roaming around the house at every minute of the day. They are probably in the same place they have been for a long while, which for a cook would be in the kitchen during daylight hours or early darkness when morons will try to pick a lock in front of tons of witnesses, or asleep when the smart crooks are picking locks in the middle of the night.

Second, it is quantum since you've tied to to an unrelated die roll. The pick locks roll is in no way related to whether or not the cook is in the kitchen or in her sleeping quarters.

So no, it isn't what was being described. What I described was the cook being at that spot, and I will quote it since you appear to have missed it, "If the cook is present on the other side of that door regardless of success or failure." If the cook won't be there regardless of the pick locks roll, then you aren't describing what I said, literally or otherwise.

And yet again, what "quantum" is changes to fit whatever argument is convenient for the arguer today.

I'm done. I'm not going to respond to arguments that make the goalposts more mobile than a parkour artist on speed.

 

[CreamCloud0]

What's the difference between those things?

Like seriously. In practice, what's the difference? Because as far as I can tell, "you put your hand in the wrong space, one that just happened to be crumbly" IS the very thing you're arguing against, but now you're saying it's totally fine. You're changing the state of the fiction by adding that, even though most of the rock wall is unassailably solid, it turns out some portions of it are a little crumbly and could be unwise to rely upon. How is that not changing things?

you don't see how
'on a success you navigated the weak sections of the wall and reached the top, on a failure you didn't and fell'
is different from
'on a success the wall was entirely solid and you climb it, on a failure it is a crumbly mess and you fall'

i guess if you care about nothing but the end results then they're the same but some of us care more about the consistency of the world than that.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

But it's a known--indeed, realistic--situation that the cook in a chateau's kitchen is going to walk around a lot

A chateau cook stays in their place of work - the kitchen, unless they are called away by something, or they are in bed. They don’t “walk around a lot” because food is constantly being prepared and someone has to supervise. They have minions who they can send out to bring in supplies, etc.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

What's the difference between those things?

One depends on a person’s ability, the other does not.

 

[Enrahim]

Well, my point was that players don’t often change the fiction without involving their characters. Change meaning the fiction is A, and then the player makes it B, with no involvement of their character. That’s not typically how most RPGs work.

Ok. I accept that

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.

I am reading that passage quite differently. I agree that if it had indeed claimed that it would be ridiculous, and I think @The Firebird would agree as well. The key differences in my reading is that it isn't the actions by the player that matters less, but the actions of the characters and that it hence isn't the game that feels less substentiative, but rather the characters feel less substentiative. Would you find such a claim as ridiculous, as I don't?

I stated what was at risk before the rolls were made, yes. The players proceeded knowing what was at stake.

Sure, several games require that you establish what’s at risk up front. I like that approach enough that I did it throughout the 5e game.

Nice! I think this is good wisdom to share. For effectivity sake I tend skip it in cases where the failure mode seem obvious tough (which I find is most of the time in my games)

I stopped critical failures a long time ago, except when the rules incorporate them in a way I enjoy more, like in Spire.

For D&D 5e, I don’t really think they’re very suitable.

I think I have so experience to share here as well: I am not fond of mechanical effects on crit fail. What I am thinking work well in 5ed are fluff or related narrative complications with no obvious mechanical pro/con. My favorite example is the wizard casting a feather fall after being shot out of a catapult. Their concentration check crit failed, so I felt free to narrate how the spell overfired and they now found themselves soaring toward the ocean with no sign of descending.

Sure, just like it’s sound advice for Fail Forward to inflict unconnected consequences… yet people are still citing that criticism.

How do you discern between those citings being a criticism against FF as a whole, rather than a more narrow critisism against entering this failure mode?

I think the metaphor is interfering with your point here… I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.

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.

You are right. That doesn't happen, just as the magician isn't actually cut in two It is all about making an experience where the players cannot actually tell the difference. If the players can accurately guess what was prepared, and what you improvised on the fly, there are still room for improvement!

This is one reasons the claim people here are sceptical to FF because of the need to improvise, rings hollow to me. What they are doing arguably require taking the art of improvisation to a way higher level than what is needed to just blurt out the first cool complication that come to mind.

What would an example be?

3.5 has a rule that say if you fail a climb check by 5 you fall. For most groups this is a straightforward rule that helps smoothen play as there are no debate when falling is on the table. However for the person deep into climbing this rule interferes actively with their flow. It breaks immersion. In a trad game of the kind the GM seek to provide an immersive and believable experience for their players, they would likely very much find this rule to be actively interfering whit way they are doing, and promptly remove or amend it.

However if rules are sacred and shouldn't be touched, this option would not be on the table, and the rule would keep on actively interfering with the game.

I think it’s sufficient, even though there are other ways to do so!

I guess we disagree then, and I do not see how to proceed toward a common understanding on the matter of what constitutes sufficient justification for something (A philosophical question that seem outside the scope of even this thread )

My response was to @AlViking, who said tgis:


“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 think the mechanism at play here is that each individual are filling in an answer in their mental model of what is going on, but it is not of sufficient importance to negotiate into the shared fiction. With this process in mind it is an important requirement that there are some possible causal relationship that can be filled in. If no such option exists then the process crashes, and someone are likely to speak up.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

you don't see how
'on a success you navigated the weak sections of the wall and reached the top, on a failure you didn't and fell'
is different from
'on a success the wall was entirely solid and you climb it, on a failure it is a crumbly mess and you fall'

i guess if you care about nothing but the end results then they're the same but some of us care more about the consistency of the world than that.

No.

What I'm saying is, in both cases, you are inventing a new fact about the world that wasn't present before. Just in one of them, you're (foolishly) making that fact be something vast and transformative, while in the other, it is narrowly-tailored and relevant.

But both things involve doing what you said was expressly forbidden. You're still inventing crumbly handholds. One is just--for some ridiculous "reason"--saying "oh actually that wall I said was solid WAS ENTIRELY CRUMBLY".

The line in the sand you claim to never cross is being crossed in both cases. You're just doing it to only the relevant pieces, not in a massively stupid and egregious way.

Because--if I were a betting man, though I am not--I would bet good money that at least nine times out of ten, when faced with a situation like this? You'd never even mention crumbly anything if the player succeeded. It's only mentioned if they fail. Meaning, you still invented it either way in response to failure in almost every instance. Failure is still what causes the world-description to now include crumbly handholds. Just as failure on a surprise check is what causes the world-description that you were looking the wrong way, or distracted, or daydreaming, or whatever else.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

A chateau cook stays in their place of work - the kitchen, unless they are called away by something, or they are in bed. They don’t “walk around a lot” because food is constantly being prepared and someone has to supervise. They have minions who they can send out to bring in supplies, etc.

Yes...

And the door...

IS NEAR THE KITCHEN.

That's why this was ever relevant in the first place! For God's sake, have we already looped around to forgetting why this was being brought up at all????

 

[pemerton]

If a player declare their character climb a cliff, and resolution indicate they succeed on this task, then indeed the character will (presumably) find themselves at the top of the cliff. However this is due to the in-fiction causality link between the act of climbing and the change of position. There happen to be a correlation between hope and what happened to the character, but there are no direct causal link. (The causal link you might find is that this hope was what motivated you as a player to declare that action)

In the fiction it seems to me that there is a causal link, in that but for the hope of getting to the top the character wouldn't have attempted the climb.

And as you note, there is an obvious causal link, at the table, between the player's hope that their PC gets to the top, and the narration of their PC being at the top: the player has their hope for their PC, the dice are rolled for the climb check, the roll succeeds, and so everyone agrees that the PC is at the top of the cliff.

In my example of the strange runes in the dungeon, there is a causal link in the fiction between the PC's hope that the runes will reveal a way out of the dungeon, and the PC's choice to try and decipher the runes, which results in the PC learning that the runes do, indeed, reveal a way out of the dungeon. The PC, of course, does not cause the runes to say what they say; but the PC, by reading them, does cause it to be the case that he knows what they say.

Turning to the table: there is a causal link between the player's hope that their PC will find a way out of the dungeon by reading the runs, and the narration of that happening. It is the player's successful action that causes everyone to agree that the runes reveal a way out, but not because the player directly authors that fact: rather, the player's successful action declaration establishes that the PC learns the way out by reading the runes, and this entails that the runes reveal a way out.

This is a special case of the general point I made upthread: in the fiction, the metaphysical truth about the runes is what causes the PC, by successfully reading them, to have a true belief about what they say; but at the table, it is the agreement among all of us that the PC has read some runes that reveal the way out that then makes it true (by entailment) that, in the fiction, the runes say what they do.

So the key question is what action declarations are permissible and how are they to be resolved? An alternative way of resolving the declared action I try and decipher the runes to see if they reveal a way out of the dungeon is (i) for someone to decide what the runes say independent of the resolution of the declared action, and then (ii) use that decision to help establish the result of the declared action - in particular, if (by whatever means, eg a knowledge check) it is determined that the PC can read the runes, the decision as to what they say is then drawn on to tell the player what it is that the PC reads. This is the process that I used in the Torchbearer 2e episode of play that I posted upthread.

These are different processes both for resolving the action declaration, and for establishing what the runes say.

I find myself being grilled on if the difference I expressed really exist. It make no sense to me that you would deny the existence of a difference, and hence it is comforting that you acknowledge that there are some difference in your second paragraph here. I have made another attempt at expressing even more presicely the difference between the ways of playing, but I am really not sure if this is a wortwhile project.

Whether it's worthwhile is, I guess, a matter of opinion.

I think that most attempts to explain what is going on fail to take seriously how fiction is established, and to pay close attention to the details of how action resolution works. I've tried to set these out in details just above, as well as in other recent posts..

I initially try to express how the thing that is widely advertised as a strength of these techniques can have detrimental effects if used in inaproperiate context. That these techniques shouldn't be used in inaproperiate contexts appear from previous things you have written is something you would completely agree with. I actually would expect you to agree to the notion I attempted to express, or maybe point out how I am unpresice about what context might be inaproperiate.

<snip>

At least at the current stage I think it might not be relevant to express exactly what the difference is as long as we can agree that there is a difference, and that this difference grants players more formal power over the narrative than trad. I think this fluffy premisse is enough to arrive at the conclusion that this difference cases distruption to a play style caracterised by player influence matching what they have in trad.

Indeed expressed like this the central claim actually seem to reduce to something close to a tautology..

Well, it does seem tautologous, or close to, that doing something inappropriate may have detrimental effects.

My interest is in achieving clarity about how different approaches to RPGing work. As I've posted upthread, trying to do this by looking at characteristics of the fiction, rather than of the play process, is in my view hopeless.