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

[JConstantine]

In D&D combat, no one decides who lives and who dies. A mechanical process is used, and all the participants are agreed to go along with it. Whoever's hit point tally reaches zero, via that mechanical process, is the one who dies, as per the rules that everyone has agreed to follow.

In 5e (2014) at least, the attacker absolutely can (if using a melee weapon) get to decide if the enemy they reduce to 0HP lives or dies. Per the PHB:

Knocking a Creature Out
Sometimes an attacker wants to incapacitate a foe, rather than deal a killing blow. When an attacker reduces a creature to 0 hit points with a melee attack, the attacker can knock the creature out. The attacker can make this choice the instant the damage is dealt. The creature falls unconscious and is stable.

 

[pemerton]

You're missing my point here...it isn't about your odds of winning. It's about the bold statement--the prize is specified in advance. This isn't the case in the rune example. Your player has specified what the prize is.

This is an empirical question about a given lottery. For instance, my friend and I can all agree to raffle off <this thing that one of us owns>, each put our tokens into a hat, and draw one out. Whoever wins, wins. They win a prize that they were party to choosing. But they didn't decide to win.

Except you aren't playing infinite lotteries. You're playing one specific lottery and choosing the prize. Nice for the contestant, I just don't understand why you can't admit it. It's your game, not mine but the player is crossing a line here. They aren't filling in some lore details from their past like some games allow, they're given a chance to alter a future declaration.

Can't admit what? That the player is helping to establish what's at stake? Here's me posting about exactly that, in this thread, weeks ago:

In scene-framing-and-stakes type games, the GM and player together determine whether the scene puts something at stake: if it doesn't, the GM says 'yes' and if it does then the check is made.

I don't know what you mean by "crossing a line". What line? I also don't know what you mean by "altering a future declaration".

they know that this declaration sets the stakes--they know that it causes the runes to have a possibility of leading to a way out.

Yes. That's the point of the action declaration.

This is not information the character has access to. From the character's perspective, their desires have no bearing on what the runes say. But the player does, and this is affecting their decision making.

<snip>

I think the use of director stance here eliminates the possibility of actor stance. The character does not know there is a director; they cannot make decisions in character if they know that the director is present and the world is malleable to their hopes and desires.

The fact that the player knows how the resolution process works doesn't mean that they're not in director stance.

I mean, the D&D player who declares an attack knows that they will be successful if they get lucky on a d20 roll. And in fact they know they have a 1-in-20 chance of getting in a hit, and thus having a chance to kill. The character doesn't know these things. That doesn't mean, does it, that there can be no actor stance declarations of attack in D&D?

 

[pemerton]

In 5e (2014) at least, the attacker absolutely can (if using a melee weapon) get to decide if the enemy they reduce to 0HP lives or dies. Per the PHB:

Yes, I know. But that's not relevant to the point I was making.

 

[pemerton]

It seems more like specifying what winning the lottery will amount to. What the prize is.

Which can be a trivial feature of a lottery: as I just posted, my friends and I can decide to raffle <X> among ourselves (where X is some thing that one of us owns), and draw lots for it.

This notion that someone else always sets the prize in a lottery is (a) false, as per the example just above, and (b) not relevant to the point being made in my posts.

 

[JConstantine]

(Emphasis mine.) Who are the "self-identified simulationists" that you are referring to?

Those engaging in this thread, but I'm sure you realised that.

Am I, having identified sometimes as a simulationist, counted among them?

Only you can answer that.

It seems @Hussar is not one, but if not why should their definition of "simulationism" be laid down as some sort of trump card?

It wasn't a trump card, merely that not even (seemingly) Narrativist-leaning persons are in agreement on how Edwards or Tuovinen define simulationism, nevermind persons who claim to be simulationist-leaning, so their definitions shouldn't be held up as gospel.

I'd thus be interested to know who your "self-identified simulationists" are, and to understand their viewpoints.

Fortunately, they are conveying (or at least trying to) their views in this very thread.

 

[pemerton]

Fail forward has two flavors: fail with twist and succeed with complications. DW implements the first flavor, but not the second flavor. However the example that most of the discussion has revolved around in this thread has been the second flavor. Hence many are using FF to mean something that include the second, as the example being discussed wouldn't permit the example used for fail forward that is being discussed.

In DW the partial success is not a fail forward technique, as it is forced to be succeed with complication. For succeed with complication to be a fail forward technique it must be presented as an option to a failure result (like in for instance BW or FATE)

I'm not sure where this stipulation of "fail forward" is coming from.

"Fail forward" means that, on a failed roll/throw/check/test, the situation does not remain as it was prior the the roll having been made. Or, to put it another way, it means that every roll of the dice changes the situation in some way,

This is true of Apocalypse World and Dungeon World, although the technical means of achieving this result is different from Burning Wheel. "Nothing happens" is not a GM move in either AW or DW.

 

[JConstantine]

Thus, often metacurrencies aren't really "gamist", in that they aren't in line with the fun of playing a game. They are in line with other goals players and GMs have.

Metacurrencies are a resource in the same vein as spell slots, power points, X uses per day abilities, etc. There's an entire strategic layer to their use that is absolutely gamist.

Edit: I've seen @Thomas Shey said much the same thing, and your reply, so I'll assume said reply also applies here.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That works, too. There just has to be lore for it. When something mechanical happens in the fiction, some sort of lore needs to be there to compliment it.

I prefer the other way round. When something happens in the fiction, some sort of mechanics need to be there to compliment it.

 

[pemerton]

One objection that folk have already alluded to is that the roll isn't really then about deciphering runes, it's about choosing possible worlds. Isn't the deciphering part just narrative dressing.

This is true - to the extent that it is - of all RPGing. I mean, it's all just "narrative dressing", that is, establishing shared fiction:

Roleplaying's Fundamental Act
Roleplaying is negotiated imagination. In order for any thing to be true in game, all the participants in the game (players and GMs, if you've even got such things) have to understand and assent to it. When you're roleplaying, what you're doing is a) suggesting things that might be true in the game and then b) negotiating with the other participants to determine whether they're actually true or not.

So you're sitting at the table and one player says, "[let's imagine that] an orc jumps out of the underbrush!"

What has to happen before the group agrees that, indeed, an orc jumps out of the underbrush?

1. Sometimes, not much at all. The right participant said it, at an appropriate moment, and everybody else just incorporates it smoothly into their imaginary picture of the situation. "An orc! Yikes! Battlestations!" This is how it usually is for participants with high ownership of whatever they're talking about: GMs describing the weather or the noncombat actions of NPCs, players saying what their characters are wearing or thinking.

2. Sometimes, a little bit more. "Really? An orc?" "Yeppers." "Huh, an orc. Well, okay." Sometimes the suggesting participant has to defend the suggestion: "Really, an orc this far into Elfland?" "Yeah, cuz this thing about her tribe..." "Okay, I guess that makes sense."

3. Sometimes, mechanics. "An orc? Only if you make your having-an-orc-show-up roll. Throw down!" "Rawk! 57!" "Dude, orc it is!" The thing to notice here is that the mechanics serve the exact same purpose as the explanation about this thing about her tribe in point 2, which is to establish your credibility wrt the orc in question.

4. And sometimes, lots of mechanics and negotiation. Debate the likelihood of a lone orc in the underbrush way out here, make a having-an-orc-show-up roll, a having-an-orc-hide-in-the-underbrush roll, a having-the-orc-jump-out roll, argue about the modifiers for each of the rolls, get into a philosophical thing about the rules' modeling of orc-jump-out likelihood... all to establish one little thing. Wave a stick in a game store and every game you knock of the shelves will have a combat system that works like this.

(Plenty of suggestions at the game table don't get picked up by the group, or get revised and modified by the group before being accepted, all with the same range of time and attention spent negotiating.)

So look, you! Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table. That's their sole and crucial function.​

To use your terminology, resolving combat in D&D is not really about fighting, it's really about choosing between possible worlds - one where the PC wins the fight, and one where their opponent does.

 

[AlViking]

In 5e (2014) at least, the attacker absolutely can (if using a melee weapon) get to decide if the enemy they reduce to 0HP lives or dies. Per the PHB:

Same in 2024 version.