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

[AbdulAlhazred]

There's an implied setting created by a combination of the psychic maelstrom, the playbook types, the Hot and Weird stats, the sex moves... it's the type of apocalypse where sexy people kill and/or have sex with one another while psychic weirdness abounds. It would be kind of hard to turn that into a disease or zombie apocalypse where everything is dark and gritty and focused on survival and working together above anything else. Probably not impossible, but kinda hard.

Well, I'm not entirely sure about that either. I mean, the most obvious and straightforward AW game is basically 'Mad Max', but it is far from the only possibility. I've not played a ton of AW to be able to say what is most common. OTOH DW and similar games, which are equally specific about milieu, definitely can turn out differently depending on group dynamics. I've really seen this with Stonetop, which is pretty close in a general way to AW and DW.

But I won't disagree that some random mix of players just showing up and making characters will probably end up describing the world as basically some variation of Mad Max. You got cars, babes, guns, etc. That still leaves a lot of room for character development!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Weird reading. It was my example and my character was motivated to break into the townhouse come what may. I pictured that they needed something inside, urgently. The quiet way was ruled out so they went loud.

What would have stifled my character is if options that I also contemplated like climbing quietly to the roof and jimmying a window were taken off the table by GM inserting screaming cook.

I'm not playing an RPG to minimise danger to my character, so I decided to escalate.

Notice I said "stiffed" rather than "stifled". That is, from my perspective, the GM screwed the player over, and thus they had to do something that guaranteed fundamental failure on their current goal (stealthy infiltration). I don't know if that affects your position or not, but it's worth mentioning; my issue isn't that a player's first attempt didn't work the way they wanted, it's that this reads to me as "nope, I'm going to nix your intent completely, you have to play it my way", but masquerading as respecting player choice.

One might call it a more subtle version of the "alright, roll three consecutive nat 20s and you can have it" problem. That is, claiming to respect player choice by "allowing" things....but making the actual chance of success on "allowed" things outside of the GM's preferred set borderline impossible. It's not as bad as the (intentionally-dramatized) need to get a 1-in-8000 result; I 100% recognize that. But the way you've presented this, basically the players got one and only one chance to do the thing they actually wanted to do (stealth), and the moment that failed, they were--as far as I can tell--railroaded into "going loud".

 

[Enrahim]

My response is that you are drastically limiting the game to dealing only with things you, the GM, decide on. I don't think you all see how nearly total your domination of the content of play is. I'm just not interested as a player in being stuck in that box!

As a GM I am absolutely not interested in doing content generation myself. I find myself attracted to prewritte adventures, but I have run 3 massive homebrew campaigns. In all of these practically all content has been directly inspired by player input. In the first the premise of what was going on was so deeply anchored in the original characters that when the player of the final of the original characters were leaving I hated to cancel the campaign as I couldn't see how to continue it. I had not yet managed to weave the new characters aproperiately into my worldbuilding, to feel it was structurally sound.

In my second attempt I was usually coming to the session with a simple idea as a seed, like "stuck at sea", "Oasis metropolis", "pirate treasure cove", And fleshed that out based on how the players were interacting with it, closely following their intentions as guidance.

My third attempt was the most radical and successful. This was originally intended as an urban "hung over" scenario. However the players didn't care about why they had woken up in jail, so the entire thing developed into a civil war scenario based on what they decided to engage in. Here I made good use of techniques like asking them to each name a thing they wanted to see in the session at the start of a couple of sessions, give the players control over certain NPCs in some dramatic moments (Those NPCs are the most unforgetable characters I have ever encountered in an RPG), and having them give each other xp boosts for coming up with cool ideas.

All of these games were run using a strictly traditional framework with noone ever questioning me in my authority to not only introduce content at will but even bending structural game foundations like having players play NPCs.

I absolutely reject the notion that I were "drastically limiting the game to dealing only with things you, the GM, decide on." Yes, I might have been the final decission maker. But I absolutely don't think that limited the game in any way. Indeed I would contend that I believe I put less limitations in how player input entered the fiction than what you would find in a (typical) structured game that try to ensure player input to be established into the fiction.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

OTOH DW and similar games, which are equally specific about milieu, definitely can turn out differently depending on group dynamics. I've really seen this with Stonetop, which is pretty close in a general way to AW and DW.

For my home game, I use Dungeon World for an Arabian Nights-inspired experience. I've made some (very minor) tweaks to a few things over time, to comport with the longer-term style I want to run (I find it bafflingly stupid to force players to stop playing their character just because they've hit level 10...) and the slightly higher emphasis on "intrigue" (e.g. I have extended the end-of-session questions, such as, "Did we loot a memorable treasure or form a meaningful alliance?", meaning, forging a strong connection with another being, force, or group that can be called upon later), but otherwise have kept it more or less the same.

Some things have cashed out in unusual ways, e.g. Wizards are kiiiiiinda the general "academic professional" educators, in addition to their normal role as spellcasters? The "Waziri Order" runs most of the professional/technical schools, so "wizard school" students rub elbows with lawyers, accountants, "scientists" (they would call themselves "natural philosophers" in contrast to the "theoretical philosophers" who study ethics/metaphysics/etc. and the "esoteric philosophers" who study magic), engineers, architects, etc. As an example, many archaeologists are double professionals, being both trained archaeologists and trained wizards, because many wizardry discoveries come from digging up something left behind by the ancient Genie-Rajahs* and applying destructive analysis to figure out how the magic works.

*A reference to the "Pre-Adamite Sultans", an idea suggested to me by someone I know of North African ancestry who had done extensive research into his cultural heritage.

 

[Enrahim]

In AW, as I said, "Make the player's characters lives not boring" and "Be a fan of the player's characters". In Burning Wheel, everything about the role of the GM and some of what is said about the role of the players.

Please tell me how that in any way shape or form connected with the phenomenom I described? Yes these are things that is in these games, but I absolutely fail to see how they in any way adresses the issue at hand.

 

[Enrahim]

If you roll low, you fail to gain your objective/intent/etc. You lose. Your loss means something new needs to happen. To leave the fiction the same as it was means you don't lose, which undermines the seriousness of the stakes at hand. Why would I cheapen what the player wants? Clearly it was important to them, or they wouldn't be risking things, and we'd all just be doing vigorous creative agreement.

If what the players want is so precious to them, maybe you should consider have that drive the story for a while, rather than denying it based on a single roll, and insert your own completely unrelated GM decided thing to do instead?

A failed roll is still a loss without destroying the price the players coveted. You failed to get the thing you wanted the way you wanted it. You need to think of a different way. That is a cost. That is a stake. Yes, the stakes are lower, but at least some times that is a good thing.

Save or die would be the classroom example of a high stakes roll. Is this an excelent example of how things should be done, or an almost universally recognised example of how not everything was better before?

 

[clearstream]

Notice I said "stiffed" rather than "stifled". That is, from my perspective, the GM screwed the player over, and thus they had to do something that guaranteed fundamental failure on their current goal (stealthy infiltration). I don't know if that affects your position or not, but it's worth mentioning; my issue isn't that a player's first attempt didn't work the way they wanted, it's that this reads to me as "nope, I'm going to nix your intent completely, you have to play it my way", but masquerading as respecting player choice.

One might call it a more subtle version of the "alright, roll three consecutive nat 20s and you can have it" problem. That is, claiming to respect player choice by "allowing" things....but making the actual chance of success on "allowed" things outside of the GM's preferred set borderline impossible. It's not as bad as the (intentionally-dramatized) need to get a 1-in-8000 result; I 100% recognize that. But the way you've presented this, basically the players got one and only one chance to do the thing they actually wanted to do (stealth), and the moment that failed, they were--as far as I can tell--railroaded into "going loud".

Putting myself in position of PC I didn't feel an iota of railroading. I considered a few likely options and chose to smash the window, as the most direct. Your character wanted stealthy infiltration; mine didn't.

But if I did, what would have stiffed me is jumping from failed lock picking to screaming cook. That really does railroad me into going loud.

Successful play is available in both modes. GM needn't railroad to screaming cook (or we can have agreed that picking lock is my one shot at the quiet way), and GM needn't railroad to pick this one lock or I stop play.

 

[pemerton]

A successful check and they said what the player hoped for. A failed check and the DM made up something different. Until the roll, though, they said nothing at all, so defining them changed their state.

The rolls etc happen at the table. Not in the fiction. The rolls affect what we at the table agree to imagine together. They don't change what the runes say in the fiction.

The quantum runes said nothing at all.

This is completely bizarre.

Upthread, you're telling everyone that even though it is never talked about at the table, the PC wizard is doing all this experimentation and stuff, which explains how - at level-up time - they learn new spells.

But because the fiction of what the runes have hasn't yet been settled, you're saying that they don't say anything.

This is like saying that, because you haven't prepared anything about the parents or childhood of some random NPC, they don't have parents and sprang into the world fully-formed like Athena.

It doesn't make any sense.

 

[Lanefan]

In what context? Are you talking about how failure and consequences work in real life? Or are you describing how you prefer they work in an RPG?

Both. Why on earth wouldn't they work the same?

Your statement is pretty absolute, so that’s why I ask. I know plenty of RPGs where what you’re saying is not true. And it’s clearly not true in real life.

It's not? Have you never, when faced with a task you can't complete by one means, tried another?

You can't open the pickle jar by hand 'cause it's too tight, so you pull out an opening tool to help. Or you run the lid under hot water knowing metal expands faster than glass, in hopes it'll loosen up. Or you get someone with (you hope) a stronger grip to give it a try. Or you give up on the pickles and snack on some cookies instead. Etc.

And most - as in nearly all - of the time, the only consequence of failure on a given approach is that you don't get to eat any pickles right now. On what an RPG might call a critical fail, maybe you sprain your wrist or drop the jar, but that's pretty rare.

Well, exactly the same principle can apply in an RPG; to wit: if at first you don't succeed, try something different.

And just as in real life your failure to open the pickle jar has no causal relationship with, at the same coincidental moment, the cat bringing in yet another half-dead rabbit from outdoors that you have to clean up, the failure to do thing X in an RPG also shouldn't trigger causally-unrelated problems much more often than the rather rare frequency random chance would dictate.

Why? Because if these disconnected events keep happening all the time on failing to do something else unrelated, it starts looking fake real fast.

 

[Lanefan]

But it very much does preserve the status quo. "Nothing happens" IS preserving the status quo. That's what it means! "Status quo" literally means "the existing state or condition"; its most common formal use is in negotiation, where a return to "status quo ante" means that, after some kind of conflict or engagement, everything returns to the way it was before.

If, as you say, nothing happens, then the status quo is being preserved. "Nothing happens" means "the existing state or condition doesn't change".

Until you change it (or try to) by trying a different approach than the one that just failed.