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

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Fortunately for me, what I wanted from the 2014 DMG was a worldbuilding guide, because its by far my favorite part of the game.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.



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.



That doesn't change what I said.



Via their character.

@The Firebird explicitly claimed his statements as personal opinion. Turns out we're all allowed to do that, even if other people don't agree with those opinions or think them harsh. At no point were they claiming it as fact.

I'm sure you disagree with a lot of my opinions, especially about modes of play you enjoy and I don't. I still get to subjective feel the way I do, and so does everyone else.

 

[JConstantine]

It's simply false to say that the runes are simultaneously good and bad. They may be good. They may be bad. They may be neither [...] But the are one or the other of these things. It's just that, until the dice have been rolled, no one knows what they are.

I'm not seeing how this is all that different from a quantum superposition. Until the dice are rolled and result in known (i.e. the cat is observed), the runes have multiple potentials. Once again, it seems to come down to framing/perception.

 

[Enrahim]

Yes, I find that equally ridiculous. The characters in most of my narrativist games tend to be at least as substantive as any in my trad games. I mean, the game is much more about the characters... it wouldn't really work if they were not substantive.

Try to read again. It was not the characters, but the actions of the characters that was claimed to be less substantive. This is a completely different claim than the one you replied to here, that I again agree is somewhat ridiculous.

<snip>
In many posts in this thread, it's been flatly stated. It's not a warning or offered as an example of what not to do... it's cited as the reason not to use the method.

All the posts I have seen people argue against using the method has been in the context of as a technique to bolt onto existing D&D living world play. Are you certain you didn't just miss that context, as that has been in my understanding implied in large parts of this thread? (This has not been explicitely stated in all posts. This is the D&D subforum after all)

I imagine this is a big part of things... I'm not trying to hide anything from the players in that sense. I'm not trying to make them think I've prepared all of this ahead of time. I don't mind if they know I am improvising.

There's no need for the illusion.

I agree in principle. I absolutely do not pretend to have prepared everything. And I don't mind talking about my tricks. But in the middle of play is not the right time to being attention to such matters, and I actually don't think anyone has ever asked me about this. The thing is that as long as the experience make it feel like there is a solid persistent world there, players generally do not seem to care how much of it is actually prepared or not.

Well, I think that the issue is that, for many trad players and GMs, the rolling of the dice is so tied to the task attempted that they see it as synonymous. They don't even differentiate it... they describe the character attempting to climb and the roll of the dice interchangeably... no differentiation between fiction and actual process. I think this tends to lead to confusion at times, and we should always try and differentiate fiction and real world practice.

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.

Yes. This separation is known to me, but reading this thread actually has made me change my mind a bit in the oposite direction. I think now that for D&D to work as intended the connection between action and roll cannot be medled with. For other games it is of course OK, but the idea of changing this up for D&D play turned out to reveal central incompabilities I didn't know existed before. I think that actually might be my strongest takeaway from this thread so far: A new appreciation for what task resolution actually does

 

[Enrahim]

I think it's best practice to use "they" until the matter is clarified, both to avoid getting it wrong and also to avoid assumption from uncertain secondary characteristics.

Yes, I use this quite a bit as well, but in this case my grammar for how to correctly apply this wasn't strong enough. I am not native english speaker, and in my native tounge we have a completely different approach for avoiding gender specification :/ But thank you for trying to help, it is appreciated!

 

[hawkeyefan]

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.

No, you've seen plenty of clarifications on fail forward in this thread. Or at least, I would have expected you to... many were in response to your posts.

A big correction that has been made is that the consequences are not unrelated to the task attempted.

And the example you provide here... of fail a climb check and knock some rocks off the cliff and alert some monsters to your presence... that is not "unrelated". They are intrinsically connected.

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

Sure, it's a game! You're the one complaining about abstractions made on a player roll.

 

[JConstantine]

I don't think "simulationism" is the best term for what people are looking for in fixed world play. People didn't like "verisimilitudinous" either. So I'll stick with fixed world. I've used it throughout and no one has complained yet

I think what most people typically mean by "simulationism" in an RPG context is "mechanics as physics engine", which is broadly the approach D&D takes (as opposed to something like PbtA or Fate). Granted, it does so in a somewhat abstracted way that allows for other approaches moreso than a more granular system.

 

[AlViking]

I'm not seeing how this is all that different from a quantum superposition. Until the dice are rolled and result in known (i.e. the cat is observed), the runes have multiple potentials. Once again, it seems to come down to framing/perception.

I would also repeat - there is nothing inherently wrong with the approach even if it's one I personally don't care for.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Go back to the Aristotelian idea I set up a while back...the right amount of improvising is 'some'. If you're improvising everything, it will not be enjoyable for some players (i.e., me.). If you improvise nothing, you aren't getting many benefits from RPGing.


I think I've mentioned that it characterizes games I've run on short notice, and that these were well received. I don't mean that they can't be enjoyable or that I'd never run anything like that. But when I think of ideal (for me) RPGing, it doesn't involve making everything up that as it is happening.


Yes...I added 'imo' to the end of my statement to clarify it was about my preferences.

Yeah, the little "Imo" at the end doesn't really do much.

"In my opinion, your way of doing things is poor DMing" isn't much better than "Your way of doing things is poor DMing".

One thing I've been trying to do throughout this discussion across it's hundreds of pages is not to pass judgment on anyone's preferred play style. Even railroading has its place and its fans.

Here's what you said:

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.

That's a needlessly harsh and judgmental opinion.

Another way of phrasing it is that author and actor stance conflict. To the extent that one is in author stance, the feeling of immersion one gets from actor stance is diminished.

But why would you need to be in author stance to declare a hope and an action for your character?

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think what most people typically mean by "simulationism" in an RPG context is "mechanics as physics engine", which is broadly the approach D&D takes (as opposed to something like PbtA or Fate). Granted, it does so in a somewhat abstracted way that allows for other approaches moreso than a more granular system.

The problem is that it not only abstracts it, but in ways that spit up counterfactuals if you press on it at all hard. AC only works in a statistical way, for example, and admixing it with other defensive properties in a simple additive way produces really odd results sometimes. Hit points (in the way its used in D&D and most levelled systems) is a dogs-breakfast of things that only make sense as a pacing mechanism and genre-support tool.

The abstraction in a lot of other areas is so far along that describing it as "somewhat" seems to bury the lede.