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

[Faolyn]

I understand the sentiment but presumably the game has principles that would limit a player from declaring that as his hope in a situation where it wouldn't make contextual sense.

The bigger issue around principles in these discussions is more that not everyone is familiar with what they specifically are for a given game and they are usually left out of the play examples from those specific games and then even if someone is familiar with them, they usually have plenty of room left for interpretation, especially in instances where 2 principles may be in conflict.

While this is true, don't forget that @pemerton said that he put them there because it would be fun and interesting, but otherwise without any meaning to them or their location. And while a quacamole recipe would be silly, since there are, as I pointed out elsewhere, probably hundreds of equally likely translations (or unlikely, since there was no rhyme or reason to their existence or location beyond "fun and interesting"), it's equally silly that the runes turned out to mean exactly what the player hoped they would mean. I don't know what kind of roll was required, but I doubt that it was "roll a 1 on a d300."

 

[Enrahim]

A lot of stuff just doesn't seem to 'come off' in trad play. So, for instance, the highly technical Ocean's Eleven style of heist, where the players have to do all the planning and detailing of things based on a GM's presentation of a scenario.

Problem number one is the sheer amount of detail that is required. Very soon the players will ask some question that the GM can't answer because they simply have not come up with that information. This yields a number of classic problems which amount to the GM needs to effectively adjudicate whether to allow a certain line of planning/action to go forward or not. The GM is going to face pressure to 'say yes' effectively, but their other option, to say no, something-or-other prevents going that route is not actually better.

Problem two is related to problem one, which is nobody on Earth is knowledgeable enough to make intelligent adjudications of most fairly technical stuff in the first place. I can imagine bank vault security and how mob guys work and even tell you something about security systems (I've built one myself, still insufficient to say much about commercial grade systems). So, there's going to be a diversity of opinions on what matters, how to adjudicate things, etc. and that's going to impact the concept of character competency. You can just try to go with tropes and a general consensus, but the more nitty gritty stuff is, the more that tends to break down.

Problem three is simply that when you try to go about adjudicating tasks in detail, the very large pile of checks that arise out of that becomes a mountain that is extremely hard to climb. In effect this is realistic, it is clearly super hard to break into a high security vault and steal a bazillion dollars! But realism is a crappy game. The original 1e PHB has that cartoon in it where the PCs are playing "Papers and Paychecks." The joke is multi-level, but one level of it is that it would be a terrible game! So, typical task-oriented 'roll for every detail' play breaks down when tasks are stacked too deep, which a technical heist is exactly going to do. Now, you could make all the DCs super easy and just roll with it, eventually one or two checks will fail and that's the drama, but I've not seen many RPGs that are tuned that way.

I'm sure there are other issues you might run into, but then lets assume I approach this in BitD fashion. There's some up front info gathering where the players essentially establish the parameters of the job. We describe it as a highly technical heist where the characters will have to disable security, open a vault, remove the goods, and escape. Now we are much less constrained by details. We can still establish the highly technical stuff, but it is more color. It just WORKS! The actual play of this scenario will work, I'm 100% sure!

What I've found is that MUCH more comes off, and in more interesting ways, with AW and games that are fairly close to it (and I'd consider BitD to be mostly in that category, though it has a bit different approach to failure).

But that is only one of the ways I felt limited in Traditional play. A lot of what I felt, as a GM, was that it was impossible to really prepare for play in a way that fulfilled the advertised concept of what this kind of play is about. That the idea of any kind of impartiality or objectivity of world facts and resolution was really kind of smoke and mirrors to me. In fact I arrived at, basically, Narrativist play by simple NOT DOING THINGS. I found that a lot of the backend work of traditional play was simply holding me back as a creative GM. 4e was pretty freeing in this regard, as I learned to run it with basically almost no prep (1 hour a week, maybe) and to just do interesting stuff instead of spending session after session mired in the mud. The three main 4e campaigns I ran over 7 years explored vastly more of Erithnoi and had the characters accomplish much more interesting stuff than all the decades of play that came before!

Now, I'm not saying everyone should do this, or will achieve great results, but the players contributed a huge amount to the setting and to play that pure traditional play never got to. It just seemed very easy. It was definitely a lot less work!

I totally get and agree to the last part. Guess how much prep work I did each week in the 3 homebrew campaigns I talked about? Absolutely nothing beyond thinking. The exception was when I in 2 of them ran a prewritten adventure as we wanted a change of pace. There was a bit of prep reading and setting up for those. - oh, and writing up a page describing the prophetic dream one of the characters had while lying in a coma while it's player was away in the first one.

So I do not really see that limiting factor you are talking about? I could of course run a dramatic style heist in D&D if I found the realistic approach too tedious for the scenario at hand.. (There is a difference between getting the Ruby in the mansion safe, and breaking fort Knox)

But of course BitD is superior in heist. That is what it does. I am in no doubt about that.. But how well does it perform if we feel like it would be cool to put the characters trough a dungeon crawl for a change?

And unfortunately I do not see anywhere you touch upon how player input factors into this?

Edit: Reading closer it might be we are actually fully in agreement, just using the word "trad" differently. I use it for play where there is one GM that has full power over the rules - where the rules are just a toolset for the GM to use to help produce an experience everyone can appriciate. Your use of the term seem to be closer to what I would have called prepared map and key-play. In which case I fully agree that this particular style of play is extremely limiting if you bind yourself to that mast without allowing for more flexible approaches when needed. (I doubt any of the even most living world fanatics in this thread is fully in that category though..)

 

[Maxperson]

It was certainly a major factor in the chain of events but the only immediate repercussion of failing the driver's test was not getting a driver's license. I'm not talking about real world philosophical or behavioral discussion on what happened*. The thing I care about in the game is how we handle the immediate repercussions of failure - knock on effects later on don't really come into play.

I don't agree with that. Something that happens can have more than one direct effect. If your PC falls off of a cliff and lands on a halfling, there are multiple direct results. You take damage from a fall, and a halfling takes damage from being fallen on.

In the case of the failed license exam, as soon as @hawkeyefan failed, as a direct result he failed to get his license, but that failure also resulted directly in how he felt about failing(embarrassment, anger, etc.) which for a kid that age meant no date.

This example is unlike the cook and pick lock scenario where there's no direct connection whatsoever between failing to pick a lock and a cook being behind the door or not being behind the door.

 

[Maxperson]

Yes, because I have shown many times that there can be consequences beyond just success/failure of the task. Other things may happen as a result. That disproves the absolute statement "only failure or success is at stake" without making an absolute statement of my own.

There can be multiple direct effects that stem from an action, or there can be one.

Yes, this is much more what I'm saying. Though, I don't know if I'd say "follows the causal chain more closely" since what most people seem to want is to ignore the causal chain in order to look at the task in isolation.

But otherwise, yes, this is more what I have in mind. I'm not claiming that either method is more verisimilitudinous than the other... I am saying claims that "nothing happens" is more verisimilitudinous are wrong.

This depends on the above. If there should be multiple direct effects and the DM only has one thing happen, it's will be less realistic(the V word is annoying to type) than if multiple things happen. Conversely, if there should only be one thing happening, then having multiple things happening will be less realistic.

And of course if any of those results have nothing directly to do with the action at hand and they are a direct result, it will be unrealistic regardless of how many effects there should be. See lockpicking failure causing the cook to be in the kitchen.

 

[JConstantine]

And you wonder why I don't consider 4e all that close to the many other versions of D&D?

I figured it would be because it's too gamist for you, what with AEDU powers, skill challenges and such.

 

[Enrahim]

@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.


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.)


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".

I am short on alloted time. So just two-three quick comments.

Your first part is mostly fine. But I am still pretty sure if you show up on an adventurers league game as a DM and start narrating regular failures in a similar way as people expect crit failures to be narrated, you will be called out.

And that is anyway missing the point of the quote you replied to. For me as a DM to be fine with taking patial control over the narrative by introducing complications, I feel like the players must have implicitly asked me to do it. If I were following the idea of players have no clue, I wouldn't be able to do anything. Hence I assume general familiarity with mainstream D&D culture when running a D&D game.

And living world is of course compatible with varying scope, and "soft" fail forward of the "no retries" variety. It is the "hard" fail forward where something particularly dramatic happens to drive the story on I think is incompatible.

 

[The Firebird]

You disagree with it based on your preference, you mean? That's how I read that... let me know if I've misunderstood.

Yes.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There have been lots of people who have said, or effectively said, that it's wrong, stupid, railroading, pointless, "quantum", to play games the way we like, and have been incredibly dismissive of our entire preferred method. Strange that you didn't think any of that was insulting.

What do you consider "effectively said"? Delusional was the actual word used. I know I've never used those words to describe the play of others (as far as I remember), just that I feel some ways about some games and feel other ways about other games.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Because most of those times, those are things that, if it were a game, wouldn't require a roll to begin with.

And also because games aren't real life. I don't play a game to be bored because nothing is going on.

Boring is, of course, relative. We're all welcome to ignore or abstract away what ever parts of play we don't find fun.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I figured it would be because it's too gamist for you, what with AEDU powers, skill challenges and such.

That's a big part of it, but I also feel it outs mechanics as a higher priority than fiction, with the suggestion that you adjust the fiction to makes the mechanics work. I also didn't like any of the lore changes, really.