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

[pemerton]

As long as you agree that the player decided what the outcome would be if/when success was rolled.

Sure. This is no different from any other action declaration, at least where the GM is obliged to honour the outcome.

Because when it comes to killing the orc the player didn't decide what the 'potential' outcome would be if/when success was rolled.

Yes they did! They decided to try and kill the Orc, and the corresponding action resolution system was employed to find out if they achieve their goal.

What we can't tell is whether you are just insisting on more precise language or really don't understand the concept around what we are saying.

For some reason, some posters - maybe you among them? - seem to me to not be able to identify the difference between the rune reading and the Orc killing case.

Here it is again:

*In the Orc-killing case, (i) the player's roll causes everyone to agree the Orc is dead, and (ii) in the fiction the PC kills the Orc;

*In the rune-reading case, (i) the player's roll causes everyone to agree that the runes reveal a way out, but (ii) in the fiction, the PC does not cause the runes to say what they say.​

That's the difference. It's nothing to do with "hope rolls" or "the PC deciding". It's about the lack of a particular type of correlation between (a) the causal relations between events at the table and (b) the causal relations between events in the fiction.

Are you really quibbling about describing this as 'the PC's action' vs 'the player's action declaration' such that you would say 'the player's action declaration' prompts X to happen in the real world but 'the PC's action' does not prompt X to happen in the real world?

It's not a quibble. As per what I just posted, you can't follow what is going on if you don't separate the two things.

And the point is in fact bigger than that, and goes to something that I and moreso @Campbell have been posting about for some time now: the failure of some other posters - including you? - to take other sorts of play on their own terms. In your play, which assumes the correlation of (a) and (b) above, the distinction can be ignored. But in the play I'm describing, it can't be - because it is ignored, nonsense conclusions will be drawn, like the runes are quantum runes until read or that the PC causes the runes to say what they say.

Because from my perspective and i presume most non-narrativists here (and maybe even some of the narrativists as well), 'the PC's action' and 'the player's action declaration for their PC' refer to exactly the same thing.

Yes, I know. That's my point: you are like a go player looking at a game of draughts, and complaining that the pieces are on the squares rather than on the points; or a canasta player looking at a game of bridge and complaining about the way hands are dealt and played.

This repeated insistence that everyone's RPGing must make sense through the lens of a rather narrow approach to play, that you know is not applicable to the episode of play that you're trying to comment on, is just bizarre.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It sounds like you have in mind some set of facts that will please you, that you deem "major". To me, it was sufficiently pivotal that the course of play was diverted.

Well, I mean, I was trying to leave open the possibility that there are things I hadn't considered. "There are more things in heaven and earth" and such. But...I mean, yes, I really do think that "I, Lilia Blanc, am incapable of picking this one specific lock" just...isn't enough? It's a very minor fact. It's not particularly relevant even across more than a five-minute span of time, to reference @Lanefan's reply.

Yes, it is a relevant fact. Lots of facts are relevant without being a meaningful change of state. That's...the whole point here. Lanefan has been claiming that the status quo somehow has changed in some significant way, but I just...it hasn't! That's what "nothing happens" means!

I'm curious to hear your frank opinion!

Alright. Forewarning, it's harsh.

I frankly don't even consider it a game, and barely even consider it a joke, and that only in poor taste IMO. The "gameplay" is like charades, except there doesn't need to be any connection at all between what you're pantomiming and what the other is supposed to guess. Any answer that sounds even vaguely techno-babble-y is sound, so, at least within the extremely broad, near-unlimited space of "sounding vaguely like science/engineering/math/pilot words", all paths are valid and every answer is as good as any other. Per the description, it is literally an entire game about "nothing happens", since the point is to temporarily pretend to be an astronaut doing dull, routine tasks while nothing much is happening.

I've had more "gameplay" in a pure-freeform roleplay website, and I've had more "roleplay" in Doom. I wouldn't even consider this a parlor game, though that's what it's closest to (hence the comparison to charades). At least something like Fictionary (aka just "dictionary") makes gameplay of making a sufficiently-convincing false definition that you earn points for deceiving others. At least in something like mad libs or group improv, there's no pretense of game, the only point is to do something interesting or funny or entertaining.

Having read up on it a bit more than your original blurb, yeah, I think I've spotted precisely where my problem with this is. This is, functionally, a Dadaist....activity. I hesitate to call it any kind of "game", because it just....isn't the kind of thing I would call a "game" any more than I would call the interminable five hours (across two separate days) I recently went through in order to get myself new ID. Instead, it's an intentional flouting of all possible concepts or restritions of what "a game" can be, as an avant garde gesture, a way of questioning/challenging what "a game" is in a provocative way.

I understand that such things have artistic merit and are in some ways important efforts, but every single one of them has always fallen very flat for me. All have failed to "broaden my horizons" or various other phrases that are frequently used. Maybe I'm just weird. Maybe the way my brain is wired, I either didn't need the lesson being taught or am incapable of truly grasping what it's saying. I dunno. But I would, without hesitation, call this the Fountain of RPGs, the Portrait of Iris Clert of RPGs.

Just in case the implication wasn't clear: I think both of these things are dumb, and I think the obsession over "works" like this is irritating to the point of distraction when I remember that they exist (something I take pains to avoid).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My not being able to pick a lock isn't a major fact about the world at large but it is a major fact to my character in the here-and-now moment, and as it's my in-character perspective that matters to me-as-player, that makes it a major fact to me.

Now sure, it might not be or remain a major fact for very long, but from the perspective of the immediate that duration is irrelevant.

I guess I just don't live in one-second intervals.

 

[CreamCloud0]

This guy hopes his PC can kill the Orc. He rolls and is successful, and so the Orc is dead as he wanted.

Or . . .

This guy hopes that his PC can kill the Orc. He rolls and fails, and so the Orc survives, gets to have a turn, and kills the PC instead.

How is a hope roll different?

I hereby declare that all rolls in D&D are to be relabelled hope rolls!

because attacking the orc is actually dependent to the character's skill and is a non-fixed outcome, whereas deciphering what the runes say is different because the runes shouldn't change depending on who reads them, what they want them to say, or how skilled they are at reading them.

if i hand you a basketball and ask you to shoot me a 3-pointer, there's a chance you could succeed or miss, but it's highly determined by your skill at aiming and throwing.
if i hand you a spanish novel and ask you to translate me page 32, page 32 is going to say what it says regardless of what you hope it to be or how good you are at translating.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Well, first off… do you see what those little arrows are doing to the letters? They’re connecting them! If we look back, I was objecting to the use of “unconnected” as a descriptor for consequences. I’m not sure how you expect visualizing the connection as a counter to my argument.

Second, I don’t quite agree that the example I gave is A --> B --> C.

A: I failed my driver’s test.

B: I canceled the date.

You’re citing the alternate means I could have used to keep the date as being involved in the causal link between me failing the test and canceling the date. But they are not. They are not your B.

At best, they are just other reasons I canceled the date. They are additional instances of A.

A: I didn’t want my parents to drive me on the date.

B: I canceled the date.

However, since I’d already dismissed those options, they were no longer a factor. It was all down to whether or not I failed the test, which I never expected to fail. But I did… so I canceled the date.



Colloquially, I said “I failed my driver’s teat, so I had to cancel my date with Amanda”.

I want to take a moment to clarify that this was actually a thing that happened to me when I was 16. I didn’t just make this example up.



Yes… context matters. The no big deal and the big deal are the consequences of failing to open the door. They’re radically different because of the context of the situation.



I’m bot following this at all.

look at it this way, cancelling the date as a result of failing your test isn't a consequence of failing your test because you didn't get the date in the first place as a result of you taking the test.

your date didn't say 'if you pass your driving test i'll go on a date with you'

 

[EzekielRaiden]

look at it this way, cancelling the date as a result of failing your test isn't a consequence of failing your test because you didn't get the date in the first place as a result of you taking the test.

your date didn't say 'if you pass your driving test i'll go on a date with you'

The victim in State [of Ohio] vs Smith didn't acquire diabetes due to any action on Smith's part, and yet the court determined that Smith's act of punching the victim was the proximate cause of the victim's death, and thus Smith could in fact be tried for homicide (and, IIRC, was in fact convicted of that homicide). Even though the direct cause of the victim's death was the fact that he failed to take the insulin he required in order to live, the court understood (IMO rightly) that that is merely an intermediate cause, something that links the true, relevant--proximate--cause to the event.

The argument simply falls apart as soon as we consider any of the practical discussion of causation. People discuss causation this way all the time. We emphatically do not look only and exclusively at the singular immediately-prior action, usually because the immediately-prior action, if we can even identify such a singular thing, has almost no useful information in it. Often, we cannot actually define a singular immediately-prior cause, because like the rational (or real) number line, any time you define two numbers, you can find another number that lies between them. Likewise, we don't telescope outward infinitely to the maximal possible distance, because that guaranteed has the endpoint of "the boundary conditions of the universe operated upon by the laws of physics."

Instead, we understand that there is a finite but flexible range over which causative consideration may hold sway. We understand that (for example) we cannot blame the coffee shop that delivered decaf coffee to the worker who then was sleepy on the job and thus failed to notice flawed workmanship of a shoddy worker which resulted in inadequate insulation being put on a house which then allowed a rat to enter the house years later and chew on the wiring of the house and thus caught fire which then burnt the house down. But we also don't exclusively assign responsibility to the rat, and thus let the construction company off the hook because they didn't personally cause the fire.

Unless, I guess, you're making the argument that we should say that it isn't in any way a causative factor that a contractor did shoddy electrical work if the house later burns down from an electrical fire when a rat chewed on a cable. If you are arguing that, then I think we have a rather more difficult conversation ahead of us (even compared to this already-Gordian thread...)

Because then we need to have a conversation about how no one can ever be responsible for killing someone else with a gun, because the reason a person died is because a bullet damaged their body, and the fact that a human somewhere pulled a trigger on a gun, by being a distinct event, completely exculpates the gunman!

 

[The Firebird]

No one said “nothing happens” is not an acceptable answer because “that’s not how the real world works” or anything like that.

It certainly seems to me that's what you were saying in these two posts.

@Lanefan claimed that his preferred method works the same as how actions and consequences work in real life. That’s not true… actions in real life have consequences beyond just failure at the task at hand.

No, it’s not. He can play his game that way if he likes. He can do it any way he likes.

But if he says that he’s doing that because that’s how real life works, I can prove him wrong. Trivially.

The first excludes the possibility that 'fail and nothing happens' can have consequences besides just the task you rolled for. The second says its trivially wrong that the real world works like that.

If the point is just 'both methods retain verisimilitude. Fail Forward connects events which are more distant for more rapid play. Fail and nothing happens follows the causal chain more closely at the expense of more rapid gameplay', then I think we are on the same page.

 

[The Firebird]

Are you really quibbling about describing this as 'the PC's action' vs 'the player's action declaration' such that you would say 'the player's action declaration' prompts X to happen in the real world but 'the PC's action' does not prompt X to happen in the real world? Because from my perspective and i presume most non-narrativists here (and maybe even some of the narrativists as well), 'the PC's action' and 'the player's action declaration for their PC' refer to exactly the same thing.

I think this is largely the source of the discontent. If the game forces you to strongly distinguish between these two it is hard to immerse yourself as if you were the PC.

For some reason, some posters - maybe you among them? - seem to me to not be able to identify the difference between the rune reading and the Orc killing case.

Here it is again:

*In the Orc-killing case, (i) the player's roll causes everyone to agree the Orc is dead, and (ii) in the fiction the PC kills the Orc;​

​

*In the rune-reading case, (i) the player's roll causes everyone to agree that the runes reveal a way out, but (ii) in the fiction, the PC does not cause the runes to say what they say.​

That's the difference. It's nothing to do with "hope rolls" or "the PC deciding". It's about the lack of a particular type of correlation between (a) the causal relations between events at the table and (b) the causal relations between events in the fiction.

Sorry @pemerton--I'm with @FrogReaver , you've not understood the difference we are drawing with the orc case. The difference you suggest here is one such difference, but it is not what we are interested in.

The important difference for us is that the player setting the stakes (deciding what is at stake).

Consider a third case: the players are trying to assassinate Lord Farquaad. The system is free form so they get to define the move. They say: "we'll break into his manor. On a 10+, Lord Farquaad appears and we slay him. On a 7-9, he's there, but there are guards and we have to fight. On a 6-, he is out of town and the guards are there."

In this case, a successful roll (i) causes everyone to agree Lord Farquaad is dead and (ii) in the fiction the PC kills Lord Farquaad", as your orc case.

However, it differs from the orc case because the player was allowed to set the stakes of the roll. It doesn't reference fixed aspects of the world, like the orc the GM described and its GM-facing stats, or that the GM wrote Lord Farquaad was out on campaign for the next month. It is a lottery where the players got to choose what to play for. Like the rune case.

I suppose you could be saying -- 'well, the event 'Lord Farquaad is in the castle' is caused by the player's roll but not the PCs action and that is the disconnect'. If that's what you have in mind, then I am confused by why you see our take on it as missing the point. Because clearly the causality is broken because the player gets to set the stakes in that way.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The system is free form so they get to define the move.

It seems to me that you have created your own problem by inserting this assumption when it is not, generally speaking, true?

That is, I don't know of any system which does this. I'm quite confident that any system which did do this would be recognized quickly for poor design.

 

[AlViking]

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.



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



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”.



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.




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



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.

Let's say the characters are at a door and can't unlock it. As they're standing there a moment later, they are attacked by an ogre. Why were they attacked by an ogre? They were being chased and they had stopped in front of a door they couldn't get through because the sleight of hand check failed. But it's also because they turned right instead of left at the last intersection, had they turned left they would have been fine. But back it up a bit more, why were they being chased by an ogre in the first place? Because they failed to sneak past the ogre. It goes on and on, a chain of events.

The important thing, and the only thing that matters as far as how I run my game is that I didn't change any of the in-world fiction because they didn't open the lock, there was not a complication added because of a failure. It would have been better for the characters if the lock had been opened but being attacked is only indirectly associated.

I follow the logic of actions and immediate consequences. Failing to pick the lock did not cause them to be attacked by the ogre, it was just the long thing in a chain of events that meant they didn't escape the fight. The real cause? They decided to explore what was happening in Ogre Mountain. But why did they decide to check out Ogre Mountain? Well, this was kind of an attempt to burnish their reputation after what they would later simply call "The Incident", so what we say caused the fight becomes somewhat arbitrary.

Other games handle things differently and that's fine. But sometimes "nothing happens" can be dangerous. Of course in many other cases "nothing happens" is just the most logical consequence of failing a check.