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

[JConstantine]

Like this stuff isn't even stuff you roll for in most of the games I run. It's just stuff you either do or don't do based on fictional positioning. Because there is no tension there. Honestly, not a lot of uncertainty either. Even in something like Vampire I'm mostly just going to look at your dots in Larceny and Dexterity and like how good your lockpicks are.

I do think that more tables could probably benefit from the GM utilising more passive checks, automatic success/failure, etc. Take 10 and Take 20 being more explicit in that regard might have been a boon compared to 5e's approach. I mean official 5e character sheets have sections of not just passive perception, but passive insight and passive investigation, and how often are any of them actually used?

 

[JConstantine]

If the exploration of setting is central to play, that is a game I’d call G-driven. The setting is paramount, and the setting is the purview of the GM. As many have pointed out, the players are expected to be very limited in how they shape the events of play… just look at the cook example.

I think the contention stems from the fact that not only in their view should players affect the world in a Watsonian/diegetic manner, while in yours (please correct me if I've misunderstood) it's acceptable from a Doylist/non-diegetic manner, but that distinction then leads you to overstate the primacy of setting in their view.

 

[JConstantine]

If the system is different than d20, I don't mind it at all. It's sufficiently different. For d20 games, it bugs the hell out of me because I've played it the opposite way for decades.

Yeah. I mentioned this in a different thread recently. Damage on a miss with weapons bugs the hell out of me, but damage on a miss with spells is perfectly fine. I'm not sure if that's because it's how it was back during 1e when I started playing, or maybe it's because magic, or maybe something else. I do recognize the inconsistency in me there, though.

I think this shows a similar idiosyncrasy to mine with roll-under. There's acknowledgement that it's not born of logic, but perception/familiarity.

There's talk of agendas and creative goals and such - all rather conscious/pro-active language - but I think not enough weight is given to subconscious quirks. It sort of gets touched on and glossed over with "preferences", ostensibly because there's not much to dissect there without getting deep into psychology instead of game design.

 

[hawkeyefan]

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.

Yes, it is a change. It's not a direct violation of the integrity of the roll, though. This is a perfectly valid way to handle the situation and your resistance to it is just an example of the thread title.

 

[hawkeyefan]

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.

Considering that the GM is the one who makes up all the factors that may be considered when coming up with the timing, they may as well just make up the timing, too.

 

[JConstantine]

Edwards characterises "simulationist" RPGing in terms of the priority that it gives to exploration:

"Simulationist" play is described by Eero Tuovinen, in a blog that you're referenced in earlier posts upthread, in this way:

I'm not sure citing persons who self-identified simulationists reject as having mischaracterised their playstyle is a particularly good method for engagement. The Narrativist-leaning people here understandably push back when others here mischaracterise their play, this is no different. Neither Edwards or Tuovinen are the authority you seem to hold them up as, even if their words resonate with you.

 

[FrogReaver]

Color can't be both a criticism of the insincerity of player added detail, and also the reason simulation is impossible.

I’m not sure what you mean here.

The rocks are below the level of granularity of the abstraction.

I think I’m pointing out that the specifics of the example can place the crumbling rocks either above or below the level of abstraction? Depending on the specific details the defense is either, ‘it’s color’ or ‘the crumbling rocks were already established’.

 

[hawkeyefan]

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".

I may or may not. I mean, as has been discussed, failure on a climb check could mean a number of things. So, if a PC falls, they may want to know why. In many cases, saying "you grabbed a handhold that then crumbled once you shifted your weight to it" may be just as good as saying "a trickle of water coming from a crack in the rock made the area slick and you slipped from the surface" or anything else. For other tasks, you may need to get more specific on a failure.

Failure to sneak, for instance... did you make a noise and potentially alert a guard? Or were you seen and definitely alerted a guard?

Now, I'm generally fine with a GM narrating what happens on a failure in a way that makes sense. I don't care if he wrote that there may be crumbling rocks in his notes two weeks prior or only came up with it after the roll was made... there's no difference to me as a player. As a GM, I typically avoid any doubt by specifically stating the stakes before a roll is made. This is a practice I picked up from the narrativist games I play that I carried over to 5e when I ran a game last weekend. There were no surprises for the players if they failed a roll because they already knew what failure would involve.

 

[JConstantine]

No. White Plume Mountain is GM-created. (Or analogous to.)

But play in WPM using classic D&D need not be GM-driven/GM-centred play. It's a type of puzzle-solving play (with some light wargame-y combat interspersed).

A simple question then: BitD is best when players are choosing their own objectives (as opposed to a GM-provided goal), but the GM is typically still the one providing the obstacles and complications, would you consider this GM-created but player-driven, or GM-driven? If the former, what if the system was D&D or Vampire or Traveller, but still utilising that same general approach?

 

[JConstantine]

The objection is solely that the "quantum"-ness is attached, mechanically, to the resolution of the declared action.

Honestly didn't think I'd find myself agreeing with pemerton, but I'd say this is true. There is nothing meaningfully different between the cook (or whatever) being there as a result of this roll vs that roll at a mechanical level, but the presentation is different and that matters to some people due to... oh, idiosyncrasies.