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

[AlViking]

4:15 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, January 5th 2065.

How's that?

Seems a bit soon for me.

 

[AlViking]

Hmm. Given that it's 40 years from now, it's entirely possible I may stop posting before that date.

Don't sell yourself short, I'm sure we could have at least a few more posts that repeat the exact same thing over and over.

 

[pemerton]

Saying I prefer a process because it feels more like real life (to me) and thus helps me suspend suspension of disbelief is fine.

Using like real life as a unexamined standard that should apply to all roleplaying games and basically telling everyone who plays differently that their play is lacking is a big problem.

A bigger problem still is using it as a limiter for terms like agency (wherein agency that exceeds real life agency no longer qualifies as agency) specifically because it moralizes what play experiences and desires are valid.

Here's how I look at this "real life agency" thing.

In real life I make some choices. But some things are thrust upon me. To mention a fairly low-stakes example, I would prefer not to have to do my laundry, but I do it nevertheless. Slightly higher stakes: I worked most of yesterday, and will work again today, in part because I got called to meetings last week to deal with nonsense that had come up at work, and that I had to resolve because my boss was on leave.

One thing I do in real life is play games. When I play those games, I am not looking to have the same sort of experience as I do when I look in the laundry basket, see a big pile of unwashed clothes, and set about sorting my socks from my delicates. I'm certainly not looking to have the same sort of experience as I do when I get an email from my boss's boss telling me that I've got multiple meetings that will suck up hours of my work-days so that I'll have to work on Saturday and Sunday to meet other deadlines.

Games, for me, are an opportunity to exercise intelligence and imagination. RPGs are a particularly special case of this - it intelligence and imagination in the context of a shared fiction that centres the actions of certain key characters. The world of the fiction no doubt contains the same drudgery and defeat and misfortune that the real world does. When I'm playing a PC, they might even experience some of it. That doesn't mean that I, the player, want to.

 

[Lanefan]

Hmm. Given that it's 40 years from now, it's entirely possible I may stop posting before that date.

Same here, which makes it a fine date because I know I very likely won't have to worry about it.

(I mean I suppose there's a small chance I'll live to age 103, but I ain't counting on it)

 

[pemerton]

The MC is the one portraying the environment, the NPCs, etc. How is that not embodying the setting? This comes across like you hold an incredibly non-standard/peculiar understanding of the word "embody". Which, frankly, a lot of the disagreement in this thread seems to stem from.

Given that the setting is established, especially at crucial moments and in crucial respects, by the players answering questions - about what their PCs know, remember and experience - I don't see how you can possibly say that the GM embodies the setting.

If the GM were embodying the setting, how would it be up to a player to tell us what the psychic maelstrom is like, or what the slave traders use for barter?

Literally the first line in your excerpt is: "Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way."

And then it goes on. Do you think that asking the players questions and building on the answers, in the way the AW rules describe, is a traditional technique?

So Tomas Härenstam defined Mutant: Year Zero as neo-trad, right? I don't know if you consider that distinct enough from trad, but if not, similar appears in other Year Zero games. For example, from Tales from the Loop (various salient parts from different subsections):

I have never read or played Year Zero games. I know that "neo trad" games are characterised - maybe by Härenstam? (I'm thinking of this blog) - as adopting "indie" techniques but somewhat repurposing them. But I don't know how Year Zero games have the GM go about either framing scenes, or establishing consequences. So I don't know to what extent they default to GM-driven or player-driven RPGing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

As someone who doesn't drive for medical reasons... this is ridiculous. Without the ability to drive, you get cut off from so many things. You have to shell out more money in order to get necessities delivered. If you need to get places, you have to hope you can get rides. You have to hope you can pay for the rides. You may not be able to get jobs, or you may lose a job, because you can't get there via public transportation or they require you to drive (my last job decided, towards the end, to turn line staff into drivers--although fortunately I didn't lose the job because of my non-driving). People in general look down on you when they earn you can't drive. In game terms, this might be even be disad on some Charisma rolls, meaning you may never be able to go on that date.

So yes. If you fail your test, it has direct consequences both immediate and long-lasting. These things would not be consequences if you could drive.

I don't think anyone is objecting to the spirit of what you're saying, but translated to the game, there's no reason any of those consequences have to be connected to the task resolution roll upon which we are basing our arguments. They can instead be handled by other diegetic mechanics, if needed.

 

[pemerton]

It's different if you break it into two steps.

The step that's common to both is the randomness of whether the bettor (or dice-roller) wins or loses.

The step that's different is that in one the bettor also gets to declare what the stakes are, where in the other the stakes are set externally, usually by whoever is running the lottery.

As I've already posted, my friend and I can all get together and choose to raffle something that one of us owns. That would be a lottery where the participants set the stakes. It still wouldn't mean that the winner decided that they got what they wanted.

 

[JConstantine]

You use the word 'owns' and I have kind of just accepted that,

Well, we're not off to a great start. I have literally never used the word "owns", except to tell you I haven't used the word, and this particular instance goes beyond misrepresenting my words into outright gaslighting. I refer you to post 15,098:

Okay, but I never said anything about it being owned?

This consistent factual misrepresentation when you try to make your point does nothing to engender a good faith discussion. Quite the opposite.

Instead, the GM in AW is RESPONSIBLE for certain things. He doesn't own the setting in the sense that we talk about owning property or even rights in our modern capitalist liberal society. Instead he owns the RESPONSIBILITY TO HANDLE those things.

Again, I refer you to post 15,098:

I said the setting was the purview (i.e. responsibility) of the GM.

it is often considered bad form for the players to know or act on information that wasn't diegetically arrived at (this often creates problems and conflicts with notions of skilled play, but that's another topic). Narrativist play doesn't really give this notion a lot of credence. Some Narrativist games may allow for a certain degree of GM holding of information, but in general this isn't a feature of such play.

This is really where I see the difference. Narrativism allows for/requires increased transparency that a. enables author and director stances more readily than trad (just to pre-empt: I think all stances are utilised across all playstyles and by different persons in different proportions), and b. trad-leaning individuals find uncomfortable. I expect this is where the mischaracterisation of "writer's room" comes from.

 

[pemerton]

The farrier is a normal feature in a medieval settlement; it makes sense that there would be one, so having the GM--or even a player--create on the fly doesn't bother people. It would be weirder if the location didn't have one, unless you could justify; e.g., the village is too small and everyone goes to the next village a few miles down the road for all their horseshoeing needs.

But the runes are, for the most part, not a normal feature, unless it's been established that runes are a commonly used decoration. Why did the GM say there were runes there? Almost certainly because they have some meaning.

I was the GM, so I can tell you why I introduced a Strange Runes Scene Distinction: because I thought it would be fun and interesting.

Why do they have meaning? Because the GM decided they do. But then you have the players deciding what that meaning is.

I was the GM. I didn't decide what the runes said. The player didn't decide either; they declared an action (which included a hope as to what the runes said) and then succeeded on their action. Thus, as per the rules of the game, it was established that the runes revealed a way out.

You can insist, if you like, that the roll doesn't matter. But you'd be wrong, for two reasons: (1) the roll is crucial in MHRP - every action is resolved as an opposed roll, and this is an important technical device for the GM to establish complications on failure; (2) had the player failed his roll, there is a good chance that I would have narrated some different meaning for the runes, that would have set the character (and perhaps the other PCs) back in some fashion.

 

[pemerton]

He was practicing other spells that enabled him to learn how to construct the new spell..

Yes, I know - you said he was practising components of those other spells and working on combining them to create the new spell. My point is that - as per your own post - this is not something that is actually played out at the table or even established at all. Rather, is something that you retrofit in once the player has decided, at level-up time, what spell their PC will learn.