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

[The Firebird]

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.

Yes, I constructed a system solely to show the difference.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yes, I constructed a system solely to show the difference.

What I'm saying is, you constructed a system that no one here would use or defend. Meaning, the difference was manufactured by that insertion. Without that insertion on your part, the difference disappears, meaning you are only criticizing a system you invented that doesn't really exist and certainly isn't played.

Analogically, you put arsenic in the orange juice in order to show that apple juice is different by not being toxic. Without the arsenic, the orange juice wouldn't be any more toxic than the apple.

 

[The Firebird]

What I'm saying is, you constructed a system that no one here would use or defend. Meaning, the difference was manufactured by that insertion. Without that insertion on your part, the difference disappears, meaning you are only criticizing a system you invented that doesn't really exist and certainly isn't played.

The point of the example was not to criticize the system.

 

[FrogReaver]

You are kind of getting into real world belief systems here, so I'm being a bit cautious about the sites restrictions on talking about religion, but some people believe in something called Actualisation. Now, its always dangerous to try and describe something believed by others that you do not believe yourself, and of course within any belief system there are individual variations, but it works something like this: if you hope for something hard enough, the universe will give it to you. So, if you you don't get that job, it's because you didn't hope for it hard enough, not because you rolled a 2 on your Persuasion check.

And there are other belief systems too, that could influence how someone interprets determinism within a RPG.

I had just watched a youtube video on that not long ago. But I don't see anyone taking that actual position here. So I think it's safe to elide discussion of it. If they were you are right that we would have to just agree to disagree.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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

A bit of an unfair exaggeration of most task resolution mechanics. I mean, an action in modern D&D (even 4e I believe) is six times that long, and older version use 1 minute rounds. How long does making an attack take in your preferred game, for example?

On the other hand, I believe Riddle of Steel uses 1-second increments for its attacks, so you may be on to something .

 

[Maxperson]

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

You don't need to live in one-second intervals. You just need to live.

Not every lock is going to be super important. If you're practicing your skills on grandma's broom closet, there's nothing really there.

If you're trying to pick the lock to the king's treasure room and you fail with a roll of 25, you've learned quite a bit and it was an important roll. You've learned that it's a super hard lock. You've learned that the lock wasn't trapped. Since it's to his treasure room, what's up with no trap? Maybe it's a false treasure room. Maybe inside is so deadly that he doesn't need to trap the lock. Now you have information to research when and who constructed the room. All from one failed roll.

 

[Maxperson]

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'

You guys are being too literal with this. If he was trying to pass his driving test, he was probably in high school or not too long out of it. Kids that young don't have the confidence that adults have. He likely told his date that he would be picking her up and there's a good chance he was mortified at not passing and having to go on the date without driving the car.

When I was that age I would have canceled that date, too. The failure is what brought him to the point that he canceled.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

It's still a False Equivalence and you still haven't responded to me. If you're not going to respond to my answer when you ask me a question, please don't ask it in the first place.

 

[FrogReaver]

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

I mean besides the obvious difference that you just agreed to right?

For what it's worth, I agree the GM is bound to honor it. I don't see the relevance of that point in relation to what we are disucssing but if it may help move the conversation forward if you can clearly see my agreement to that point. I think it's been a while since this was stated, but I'm not saying fail forward doesn't work in general. The point of saying fail forward is different than regular resolution is only so that I can explain what I dislike about it and discuss how it conflicts with many D&D playstyles. And yes, there are many differences I would count as pros in the fail forward column. I can understand why someone would look at that list of pros and decide it's a better way for themselves. But there are differences about it in the con column as well and maybe for you those things bear little weight, but for others they bear significant weight.

Part of what it seems is typical of these discussions is 1) talk up the differences where fail forward is a pro and 2) deny any differences where fail forward is a con. 3) Another framing of the same thing might be 'fail forward is objectively better since it has a bunch of pros and no cons'. 4) and if that's really the position, then you objectively aren't leaving room for others preferences as preferences 5) which is why IMO there is always such intense pushback on this topic.

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.

They did not make the decision that on a success they would kill the orc, they didn't even make the decision that on a success they would hit the orc and harm it (taking away some hp). The failure stake in this orc example is also system decided, on a failure you miss. The system, independent of the player decided all of these stakes.

What the player did was decide to attack the Orc because they knew the stakes the system set. Their 'hope' for a specific outcome didn't factor into the resolution process at all.

(If you want to go back to first cause the players deciding to play a game where the system has these stakes could be framed as the players deciding those stakes by virtue of deciding to play this game, but even that's ultimately different than deciding to play a game where they get to decide the stakes [or the success part of the stakes] on the fly).

Contrast to the runes, the player did decide that on a success what the runes would be. The GM decided or will decide (depends on specific system implementation) on a failure what the runes will be (with the constraints that whatever they decide must be negative for the PC's, related to the PC's and also push the game forward). Thus the players 'hope' for a specific outcome factors into the resolution process as the result on a success, whereas in the orc example, the 'hope' has no effect on resolution process. (Similar could be said about the failure state involving the constraint that it must be 'related to the PC's' and the failure states independence in the Orc example).

This is the part that conflicts with simulation play, something i think you've readily admitted even very recently in this very thread.

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.​

I don't disagree with those assessments. But that doesn't make the scenarios the same. There are important details you are eliding in this framing that I and others keep on pointing out.

Those details are specifically around how the stakes of the roll are determined and ultimately how players setting those stakes impacts the simulation.

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.

IMO there's a 1 to 1 mapping between the players action declaration and the characters action. Because that 1 to 1 mapping exists, then saying the players action declaration does X is the same thing as saying the characters action does X. Since you cannot have 1 without the other then either can be accurately described as the cause if one is.

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.

Again, I have no problem with you playing the way you play. There's plenty of pros to it. All I'm saying is that there are cons as well. Can you admit there are some non-trivial cons to it? I even agree the principles rule out quite a few of the hypothetical examples (but that's because we are exploring the general technique of fail forward and not the specific implementations). But I'm also fairly certain that with a full understanding of the principles that there would be hypothetical example that could be constructed to illustrate similar points in less outlandish ways. So focusing on 'bad hypotheticals' without offering the information needed to correct them isn't great for the discussion either.

Like the most egregious example of what we mean is the rune example from actual play. Your point is that well the player cannot actually put success stakes for anything imaginable due to the principles of the game. Awesome! But that doesn't rule out them potentially establishing a diverse variety of success stakes. Like your runes revealed a way out. What if instead the player hoped the runes would teleport them to another location. Or that the runes were a spell of such power that they would blow a hole out of their current location. Or etc. So yea, it cannot literally be anything, but from my perspective that kind of misses the point.

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.

Right, so why would a narratvist player like yourself ever complain about the way a game of D&D is 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.

Again, this thread turned sharply toward 'fail forward' in D&D. The lens of the narrow approach to D&D play is certainly applicable here. What's bizarre is trying to treat this conversation as one about 'narrativist games on their own terms'.

 

[JConstantine]

I was responding to your "requires".

And as I posted way upthread when you said a similar thing, I disagree about "allows".

You seem to have misread my post. The "allows for/requires" was in regards to increased transparency from the GM, which is in line with what @AbdulAlhazred and @hawkeyefan have been talking about. The follow-up on stances is a circumstantial result of that transparency.