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

[Lanefan]

What is the theft in the example of the runes?

The analogy there is that the GM - who in theory controls the setting - gets to put the runes there but doesn't get to determine what they say.

Similarly, the neighbour gets to buy the barbeque and put it in his yard but doesn't have any say in who ends up getting to use it.

 

[pemerton]

Ooh! Ooh! Can I play? "I wish that the orc was really a pinata full of candy" and when he successfully hits they're showered with candy. If he misses the orc turns out to be a swarm of deadly spiders that were just pretending to be an orc.

Is this the sort of game you enjoy?

No wonder you're not interested in Burning Wheel then!

 

[pemerton]

The analogy there is that the GM - who in theory controls the setting - gets to put the runes there but doesn't get to determine what they say.

But obviously the GM in MHRP does not have exclusive control over the setting. Because if they did, then the example would make no sense!

 

[Micah Sweet]

4e D&D is replete with "narrative" leaning ideas. Here's an old thread about some of them: D&D 4E - Pemertonian Scene-Framing; A Good Approach to D&D 4e

You do realize this is, by name, your personal way to play 4e?

 

[Faolyn]

The PC's action doesn't cause anything in the real world, as a special case of the general principle that imaginary things don't have real effects.

The player's declaration of their PC's action causes some things to happen in the real world, including prompting others to say and imagine various things depending on how some dice rolls turn out.

Oh, for--! Are you doing this thing again?

We are all aware that the game takes place in an imaginary state.

 

[Faolyn]

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.

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.

No matter what you might claim, "what the player hoped for" and "what the player decided" is, in this case using these rules, exactly the same thing. Because--by the rules of the game--your "fun and interesting" runes that otherwise had no meaning turned out to be exactly what the PC wanted them to be.

By those rules, if I said that I hoped the runes were a guacamole recipe, and then succeeded on my roll, then it certainly seems like they would be--even though that makes absolutely no sense in context.

You can insist, if you like, that the roll doesn't matter. But you'd be wrong,

I didn't so much as hint that, let alone insist that. What I have said is that there is a reason people here are balking at the runes in a way that they wouldn't balk at a farrier, and this is why.

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.

 

[Faolyn]

Because one of two things would quickly happen: either they'd feel overwhelmed with compounding badness or feel like I'm leading them by the nose.

Neither of these is desirable.

...All that takes is practice to get the balance right.

 

[thefutilist]

As I said, without knowing how Tenets and Convictions work in V:tM V5, I don't know whether they support simulationist play or narrativist play.

The rules text is a bit of mess because it doesn't seem to want to commit to anything. Its resolution system is the worst offender because the authors don't seem to know why they have one, then vast chunks of the book are dedicated to it.

On the other hand, it's probably the best beginner Narrativist text I've read but that probably speaks to how naff I think most Narrativist texts are.

One thing it does great is introduce the idea of transposing GM created backstory onto a group created relationship map. It's so close to being really good it's kind of frustrating.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Your failing a drivers exam was not the cause of you not going out on the date, you not finding alternative mode of transportation or rescheduling the date was. If the knife wielding maniac is chasing me, my inability to open the door did not cause the knife wielding maniac.

I’m literally telling you that I didn’t go on the date because I didn’t get my license.

Could I have made other arrangements? Yes, possibly. But I didn’t. I canceled the date because I didn’t have my license.

Is there anything else to add other than that we're playing flawed games because we don't run our games the way you do and have different opinions?

I haven’t said any of those things. Your reading comprehension needs some work.

I don't believe it is. You deal with those less direct consequences through other diegetic means. It all still holds up even if you don't bundle everything into one roll.

I didn’t say it doesn’t hold up. It can work as a game either way. My point is that neither is actually closer to “how the real world works”.

I guess we're at an impasse then. I think the only direct consequence of you driving exam is that you didn't get the license. The decision not to go on the date is indirectly connected but it is an entirely separate event.

No… as the person who went through this, I’m telling you why I didn’t go on the date. It was because I failed the test. I was embarrassed and didn’t want to rely on my parents for a ride and so on.

And so I think your way of look at it is a very strange way to look at real life. It's ascribing causality where there is none.

So if someone were to have asked me why I didn’t go on the date, what would you have said was the reason?

Whatever the independent nature of the world causes would happen...that is unrelated. The fact that you forgot your keys did not cause someone to run after you with a knife. That was independent of the keys.

I’m not saying, in any way, that the maniac was caused by the failure to open the door. I’m saying that consequences depend on context, Most times, if you forget your keys, all that happens is you need to find another way in. Maybe you have a backdoor you can open or a spare key hidden in a false rock or whatever. Minor consequences.

But if you’re facing some kind of danger… if there’s a knife wielding maniac chasing you… then you’re facing very different consequences, right?

No one would ever say that all that can happen in both instances is that you fail to open the door.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

@Enrahim I'm glad what I had to say has been helpful to you, though I didn't have a lot to respond to overall in the post. So I'm focusing in on specific bits. Not because I'm ignoring them, but because I felt these were the ones that would get more done, rather than "mhm" or "ehh..." or the like.

People signing up for it expect failure to only indicate task failure

I am not nearly so convinced of this. I don't think most players realize what they're signing up for at all with D&D, beyond "a fantasy game where I get to play a cool character".

I do think that the very hardcore-sim fans do have a very specific idea of what they're signing up for. But for the vast majority of people, if you mentioned anything at all--even in the most layman-friendly terms possible--about what they're expecting in terms of "task failure" vs other things, they'd stare at you blankly and ask, "Uh...what does that mean?"

Or, another way to put this: fresh players genuinely have no idea. Non-fresh, but also non-hardcore, have not thought about it, they just know what D&D does. That leads to a significant group of people who think D&D's way is the only way, and thus anything that isn't D&D's way is "wrong" somehow because it conflicts with a completely unstated assumption that they've never actually thought about and lack any useful vocabulary for describing. D&D teaches people to do things its very specific way, which is not only not generic, it is pretty dang specific, and there are a lot of other approaches which are either "pretty dang specific" in a different direction, or actually more general, as in, they don't narrowly require everything to be this one model of what success and failure are, they embrace a variety of concepts for what success-and-failure mean.

This is both the blessing and the curse of D&D. People sign up for it without actually knowing what they're signing up for, and those who do and then stick around often do not realize just how narrow D&D's structures can be. It's a gateway, but it's also really narrowly specific. Like how Dragon Ball Z was the gateway anime for a lot of Americans--but if you think that ALL anime has to be mostly-comedic vaguely-martial-arts-inspired and drawing heavily on Journey to the West, you're going to react rather negatively to a HUGE, HUGE swathe of what "anime" is, because you're coming at it with the mistaken belief that all anime should be like DBZ.

And I think that also shows one of the really weird social...quirks, let's say, of how TTRPGs work within the minds of people. For some reason, folks instantly grok that just because you know one band of a particular style of music, or one work in a particular genre of animation, or one author in a particular branch of genre fiction (e.g. murder mysteries)....doesn't mean you know everything! That you should in fact expect very different things from different creators, and that you often can't get a full understanding of what it means for something to be "a mystery" or "a glam metal song" or "a romance film" or "an anime" etc., etc. just by consuming work from one singular source.

For some reason, exactly the opposite happens with TTRPGs. People get in via D&D...and then they think everything must use the same concepts and philosophies and structures as D&D, and anything which doesn't is somehow flawed or wrong or "niche" etc., when it very much could be D&D which is the "niche" thing, it just by total accident happened to be the one that took off first. (In that sense, I am reminded of the rise of Thebes as a power in ancient Greece. They basically bumbled their way, buttocks-first, doing stupid pointless things, into being one of the strongest city-states in Ancient Greece for over a century, and remained relevant for decades after their heyday. Proof that just because somebody got big, doesn't mean they must have been clearly right and smart and well-prepared. Sometimes, the accidents and outright follies of history really do shape the course of empires.)

That leaves the question - what if trad try to introduce FF for their group to see if there could be consensus for trying it out? Me myself don't see any principle problem with it in "trad" in general. I still think it is fully incompatible with a game advertised as a living world. Me personally would not want to play with it in anything but one shots or short adventures, but that is due to my prefered pacing of a campaign (more contemplative and deliberate), not due to any more fundamental problems with the concept.

I don't see any problem with it, but I also don't see it as incompatible with a game advertised "as a living world". That is, I don't think a "living world" needs to be one where resolution mechanics are always narrowly laser-focused on the tiniest units of action one can get away with without absurdity (e.g. we don't make someone roll for every step along a narrow ledge, we treat the whole narrow ledge as one chunk even though we could divide it up). Which, for me, brings up a very important point here: it's not a binary.

That is, it's not like the D&D-alike approach, which you have called "task failure", cares nothing at all about intent, manner, or wider context. We do in fact take some degree of flexibility of scope, even in hard-sim, ultra-"trad" D&D. Even the most simmy of sim fans recognize the utility of concepts like "let it ride", assuming they have informed themselves on what it is for, because they understand that the nature of iterative probability makes it terribly punishing to ask for excessive numbers of rolls. And, as your previous example with the solid wall with crumbly handholds has given, it's also not the case that the D&D-alike approach--"task failure"--doesn't invoke revealing a new key detail about the world because of failure, either. It does, generally, tend to favor keeping any such reveals "local" (closer to the direct action is much preferred over farther from it), "small" (fine details or easily-overlooked things, rather than broad details that should be easily found even by casual observation), and "narrow" (range of applicability in space, time, amount, and/or persons should be reduced when possible)--but it isn't totally against a broadening of scope or a loosening of direct connection under circumstances that can happen with reasonable frequency in actual games.

Basically, by calling it "task failure" as separate from whatever you would call the alternative, this implies they're two genuinely distinct things...and I don't think they are. Instead, there's a spectrum of specificity. Most folks agree that allowing specificity to fall to zero (infinitely wide scope) would be bad, as that would make it pretty hard for anyone, player or GM alike, to really grapple with it. Conversely, as my "we don't make players roll for every single step to cross a narrow ledge" example hopefully shows, we also don't want the inverse, driving specificity to infinity (and thus infinitely narrow scope), because we know that that leads to problems.

I know I make a lot of video game analogies and these probably aren't desirable for a lot of players, but I'm really REALLY strongly reminded of games like "Surgeon Simulator" or "QWOP", as compared to games actually meant to feel like you're doing surgery or running around places. QWOP has narrowed the scope almost infinitely far: you have to independently control not only each leg, but the thighs and calves of each leg. This is, in a certain sense, objectively more "realistic" than any other video game that involves running, because the real physical process of running involves precisely controlling your calves and thighs to physically move your body. However, in a very important sense, it is dramatically less realistic than most games that involve a running person (e.g. something like Mirror's Edge), because, even though this is objectively more like the physical motion of running, QWOP's mechanics feel so blatantly unnatural and "wrong" and make the whole task enormously difficult.

My point with this analogy is that both your "task failure" approach, and whatever you would contrast it with, cannot possibly be at the extreme ends of the scale we're comparing them on. By necessity, they are closer to one another than they are to either extreme. Hence, there is no bright-line distinction between the two of them. It's a matter of finding the scope-range you like and the degree of scope-flexibility that you're comfortable employing. Having played (and quite enjoyed) Ironsworn, a game that is...PbtA-adjacent, one might say, I am supremely confident that fail forward can work perfectly well in a "living world" game.

The one thing you would have to accept, though, is that the GM doesn't actually know functionally all facts in advance of the players knowing them. That's the one key difference. In the approach you describe, the GM functionally always knows every fact about the world at least some amount of time before the players do, and usually knows any given fact about the world well in advance of the players. Now, if the players do something that changes a publically-known fact, then of course that's something the GM learns at the same time as the players do, but even in many cases of player action, the players won't know that a particular fact has changed until a good while (hours, perhaps sessions, maybe even many sessions!) after the GM does.

That very very much does not mean that the GM can't know anything earlier. As I have been taught in this very thread, GM prep is essential and that inherently requires that the GM know things the players don't yet know. But things like the PbtA principle "Draw maps, leave blanks" are there specifically to remind the GM not to prepare excessively. By leaving room for things nobody knows yet, not even the GM, the system ensures that it is never a situation of "the players are simply uncovering the world the GM already built and fine-tuned for them".