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

[Pedantic]

This view is at the heart of why people are flipping out about a roll "causing" a cook to appear. Instead of looking at the roll as a prompt for the GM to narrate a cook on the scene as a complication. They view it as the character making the cook appear.

This is a failure to separate the real world event (the dice roll) and the in fiction event (a cook becoming aware of the break in). For them, when a player rolls dice, that IS the character attempting the action in the fiction.

As apprehensive as it makes me to throw the term into any of these conversations... This is exactly why I've pushed for a mechanical understanding of immersion; of we understand immersion to be about actively trying to achieve the conflation you're discussing here, to push character decision making and player mechanical play to be as close as possible to each other, then it becomes clear what the trade-off you're calling for is.

 

[AlViking]

....
This view is at the heart of why people are flipping out about a roll "causing" a cook to appear. Instead of looking at the roll as a prompt for the GM to narrate a cook on the scene as a complication. They view it as the character making the cook appear.

This is a failure to separate the real world event (the dice roll) and the in fiction event (a cook becoming aware of the break in). For them, when a player rolls dice, that IS the character attempting the action in the fiction.

Which is a perfectly fine way to play... but it doesn't have to be the case.

We understand how it works, we just don't care for it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

That was my point. A lot of time detail comes out when its relevant, and otherwise gets elided.

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.

Yeah, but, bluntly, when you're not dealing with gotcha GMing or old-school "we have no rules for most things so we have to push it up to the player level" style skilled play, most people aren't going to bother most of the time because its just extra temporal overhead the majority of the time.

 

[hawkeyefan]

<I asked about examples of fail forward>

To me that's a partial success, which is different from fail forward. The preexisting clock did not change, the preexisting event did not change, no trolls suddenly appeared to harass him. This is not, to me, an example of fail forward or success with complication because you added no new complication that did not already exist in the fiction. Taking longer to climb is a diegetic penalty for failing the athletics check.

You didn't add anything new to the fiction of the world because of the failure.

This is fail forward. You continue to ignore clarifications on what fail forward means and instead continue to work with your flawed definition of it.

<failing an athletics check described as crumbling rock>


The reason they failed was because their check was under the DC for the climb. We're talking about a game, here what else do you need? Do you have to provide a reason why every attack misses it's target?

That's why the player failed. Why did the character fail?

Depending on the game, yes, I may need to provide a reason why an attack misses. Or, more likely, I need to describe what happens when an attack misses... because for many games "nothing happens" is not an option.

All of those skills may be useful for burglary but are in no way limited to burglary nor even necessary for burglary.

My point was not how these skills related to the act of Burglary. My point is that these skills work similarly to how the proposed Burglary skill would work... that they cover a variety of actions rather than just one. You had complained that such skills make the game feel like it's "more about the story than the adventure".

5e has many such skills.

 

[JConstantine]

Heck, how many GMs actually read the GM section? In D&D, it's notorious that even DMs don't read the DMG beyond the treasure tables.

To be fair, the 5e(2014) DMG is awful. It's not so much a dungeon master's guide as it is a world builder's guide. There's no guidance in there on how to adjudicate (i.e. decide when to invoke a mechanic), nor setting the scene, or narration, or pacing, or anything actually conducive to running a session, let alone campaign.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Possibly. The original context was @Lanefan implying he engaged in illusionism, which caused @Hussar to express incredulity that it would occur from the GM side. My assertion was that GMs tend to run the sort of game they would like to play in and so I found Lanefan's comment perfectly understandable. @Thomas Shey and your sentiments about not always getting to run the games you really want doesn't inherently contradict that, even if it's something I can relate to (I have a document that currently contains 20 or so campaign pitches with varying levels of interest). Hence my question.
Now your claim about being a service-oriented GM is absolutely a counterpoint to my original assertion, but I must admit I'm skeptical of how representative that is.

I'll just note there isn't a direct correspondence between the kind of game I like to play and like to run, however. There's some overlap but they don't match up perfectly Also, like Umbran I've got a fairly wide set of things I like, so its less "don't get to run things I like all the time" as "Don't cover the complete ground of things I like." This usually has more to do with campaign type and genre than systems (for the most part, there aren't many systems I'm enamored of that my players don't want to deal with, though there's a few on the "probably would be kind of okay with this as a player but don't feel all that interested in running it" cases).

 

[Campbell]

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?

I don't think it's all that important a distinction, but for me it's about who determines the premises we're exploring through play. Almost all situation is GM-created, so my prism is are they setting the premise for the situations they frame from either world building they have done or plot they are pushing. Or are the situations developed with the characters, their premises and their goals in mind?

The games I run tend to be more aligned towards the premise of the characters, but I'd say most of the games I play in tend to fit a more hybrid model where some situations come through world building, some through plot and some through character premise.

What matters here is the GM's process which is somewhat related to system (in that system defines the GM's role) but obviously we play Vampire and other games more character premise forward than most folks.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't agree with your assumptions about play in d&d. "Cliff, DC 15, crumbly" gives you all of the information you need to narrate. I've heard and given descriptions like this.

Sure, I'm not disagreeing with that. But with the wider implication that this is all that's always needed, and is always provided.

No GM will provide everything ahead of time. They will need to come up with details on the fly. And there's nothing wrong with that.

But more generally, even if this is true for most d&d games, that doesn't really matter, because no one is asserting that most d&d games are good. Maybe there are a lot of DMs out there who are changing the fiction on the fly or hiding salient details or making stuff up on the spot. These are just instances of poor DMing. Imo.

See that's awfully judgmental and overly harsh. It describes my entire 5e game that I ran this past weekend. I didn't hide salient details, but I made all kinds of things up on the spot.

A repeating refrain in this thread has been about how we're just talking about preferences here. I'm going to tag @Micah Sweet here so he can wag a finger at you as he does at me when he thinks I'm being too judgmental about his preferred play style.

Yes--but in OSR play, the DM is adjudicating things in a simulationist manner. They check their notes, or they use chance to decide. They're meant to be impartial. It would be a big failing on the part of an OSR DM if they said "Bob wants these runes to lead to a way out...if he gets a 15+, I'll make that the nature of the runes".

That doesn't change what I said.

This is explicitly not the case in the runes example. The player came up with an idea, and, subject to a successful roll, was able to introduce it to the fiction.

Via their character.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

This is very much of an issue of framing though. The sentence "I failed to climb the cliff in the time I needed" is not an inappropraite use of "failed", and it could very well be an appropriate use of "failure" in a resolution system. Frankly, in some respects climbing is one of those things where short of falling (which seems better reserved for fumble rolls) its not clear what failure should even mean other than taking longer than intended most of the time. That's true of a lot of repeatable-attempt things.

 

[AlViking]

This is fail forward. You continue to ignore clarifications on what fail forward means and instead continue to work with your flawed definition of it.

I was just curious how the DMG defines this, they would probably define it as Degrees of Failure. But every definition of fail forward that I've seen other people describe is something along the lines of "you still succeed but there's some consequence unrelated to the task you were attempting". You fail a climb check and you knock some rocks off the cliff and you alert some monsters at the bottom was an example.

Your clarification doesn't match what other example state.

That's why the player failed. Why did the character fail?

Because we can't physically model every breath the character takes we rely on abstractions. It's. A. Game.

Depending on the game, yes, I may need to provide a reason why an attack misses. Or, more likely, I need to describe what happens when an attack misses... because for many games "nothing happens" is not an option.



My point was not how these skills related to the act of Burglary. My point is that these skills work similarly to how the proposed Burglary skill would work... that they cover a variety of actions rather than just one. You had complained that such skills make the game feel like it's "more about the story than the adventure".

Because the burglary skill implied multiple actions covered by one check.

5e has many such skills.