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

[Maxperson]

So you're basically saying that a character making a diegetic statement about the campaign setting that already hasn't been introduced is player authoring?

Do you really not do that? That's just play. That's how I've played D&D for 30 years.

A player dictating how something outside of his character works for the world is authoring, yes. Whether you play that way or not doesn't change that. And I'm not saying it's bad. It's not "just play," though. Something that's "just play" would be generally true across RPGs and playstyles, and this kind of authoring isn't.

 

[Maxperson]

So, stuff that has not been established (if a cook is around close by) can neither be diegetic or not. The characters making noise trying to break in (due to a failure) and encountering a cook who was nearby (due to a GM decision to move the game forward in a way they find compelling) follows from what has been established but introduces new elements (with the GM making a call about the presence of a cook because they feel that adds something to the scene).

So, we have an C which requires both A and B to be true - A + B => C. Even if B is decided by a GM motivated by making the lives of the player characters not boring A is still a necessary component that leads to C. Not liking how B was decided by the GM does not make A and C disconnected.

If you don't have an agenda as GM that includes making the character lives' not boring you should not use fail forward. But to imply that people who use it are playing games with disconnected or disjointed fiction is not cool and not accurate. But it's the agenda, not the mechanic that supports it you likely have the actual problem with.

The problem with the mechanic causes the cook to exist is two-fold from my perspective. First it presents a view where the GM has no agency in how things go, but the way fail forward is expressed is entirely on the GM. The cook is there because they made a decision about what sort of complication of all available ones was the most compelling (furthermore in trad implementations it's usually on them to invoke fail forward itself). The other is that like for stuff not established whether something exists or not is up in the air.

I get people might favor or not favor particular GM agendas or principles in the play they prefer but pointing at their set as more real or authentic when it's really about particular aesthetic preferences we have is like not cool. There are ways to express stuff is not for you without trying to make it look ridiculous by taking a mechanic out of its usual context.

Holy failed assumptions Batman! Just because we don't use fail forward, does not mean that we want the PCs' lives to be boring. Those two things don't line up.

 

[AlViking]

The problem is that I've seen this with people who I flat out refuse to believe have things nailed down in their world to the degree the kind of things I'm talking about are contradicting things. Maybe there's people who know everything about ever village within 50 miles and who's who in each one, but I'm willing to put money its vanishingly small. We're not talking about off-the-wall things here, but stuff like "My family has been known as capable artisans in the village for the last three generations."

Knowing artisans? Fine. You're descended from an ancient gold dragon that rules the mountains? No. Your family has the closely guarded secret of gunpowder? Can't happen, sorry.

But want some ideas on where that village is? Settled region or edge of the wilderness? On the ocean? Near a big trade city? What's your race and on and on. If you're playing a wood elf, I can give you the likely places in the region you would come from and a bit of lore and history.

I can't help it if there are bad GMs out there, even if the extreme examples are pretty much mythical in my experience. Even the extreme you said is something I've never encountered nor heard of. Millions of people play so a fraction are bound to be bad GMs.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't think that RAW comments on how loud a failed lock pick attempt is versus a successful one. I think that's more in the "rulings not rules" category, which seems perfectly suited to his kind of situation.

Right. The DM would have to homebrew in one being louder than the other. It's not RAW that it is. If you feel the need to make a failed attempt louder for some reason(and I see no reason why it should be), then you can do so.

Why do you think the timing matters in this way? And what's the difference between someone else who makes those rolls in the moment as needed in play?

This is why I think this quantum label is kind of useless... it's fiction that we're talking about. At one point, it doesn't exist, and then a moment later it does.

It matters if you want the world to feel like it exists independently of the players. "Quantum" for the DM doesn't affect that feeling, since he is running the world and setting things like this up in response to player driven play.

If the roll is done in the moment by the DM, it takes a little bit away from the world being independent of the players, since the roll is happening right then because of the players, rather than having been done prior and the encounter already existing within the world.

If the roll is done in the moment by the players, it takes away a huge amount of the world being independent of the players, since the encounter is relying on a player roll.

No, you came up with the farrier in response to the player bringing up the farrier, and then you treated the farrier as if he was there all along.

It was there all along, since towns pretty much always have farriers. I just didn't think to write it down before then.

No, not if the attempt to get through the door is what brings them to the room or otherwise alerts them.

It would alert them with a successful roll as well, though. Poking around with tools trying to gently turn tumblers isn't going to be louder for someone without skill as with. At least not significantly so. You're making it sound like the unskilled person is just pounding the tools into the lock and making a bunch of noise.

I'm actually looking at the 5e rules and there's no such thing as picking a lock without skill. You must be proficient with thieves' tools to even pick a lock, so this entire argument is moot. It's skilled vs. skilled. One just may have a higher bonus is all.

Again, rulings not rules. One GM may rule as you do above. Another may decide that a lock pick attempt includes all the relevant factors of attempting to pick a lock, including being aware of potential observers and making noise. That seems reasonable since typically most GMs aren't going to ask for 5 different rolls for one action.

Again, this is homebrew and not RAW. Homebrew has no real place in a discussion about rules. By RAW, picking locks picks the lock. There's nothing additional to it.

Now, I personally don't really mind if people want to use "quantum" as a criticism because I feel I can address that. But when a poster is calling for others to stop using words they don't like, the fact that they use words others don't like seems relevant. I'd much rather we all stop complaining about what words are used and instead talk about the ideas that words convey.

It's not even a criticism, since we are applying the term to both sides of this discussion.

 

[Maxperson]

Food would not be delivered by the cook(s) regardless. It would either be carried up to the person in their private rooms by their personal servant(s), or placed in the dining area before the employers and their guests arrived, covered by cloches to keep it warm until they sat down. If additional courses needed to be delivered, they would be so by senior/personal servants.

Yes, it was a decidedly messed up system where tons of work needed to be done as if by magic.

Maybe. There's no reason to assume that there are more servants involved with this. In a castle, sure, there are lots of servants and the cooks(plural) wouldn't be involved in serving most of the time. In a private residence, the cook is probably also the server.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Knowing artisans? Fine. You're descended from an ancient gold dragon that rules the mountains? No. Your family has the closely guarded secret of gunpowder? Can't happen, sorry.

I believe I spent at least two posts acknowledging this problem. Not the cases I'm talking about,

But want some ideas on where that village is? Settled region or edge of the wilderness? On the ocean? Near a big trade city? What's your race and on and on. If you're playing a wood elf, I can give you the likely places in the region you would come from and a bit of lore and history.

What if I don't care at the moment, and say "You can do that part all you want."

I can't help it if there are bad GMs out there, even if the extreme examples are pretty much mythical in my experience. Even the extreme you said is something I've never encountered nor heard of. Millions of people play so a fraction are bound to be bad GMs.

And I've seen it enough I don't think its exceptionally rare, at least enough to having to bring up millions of people.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's a simple principle: if you don't want me to fire the last shot, don't fire the first one.

Which just results in disagreements over who fired the first shot, in my experience. Person A thinks action X was totally cool, person B thinks it's unforgivable. Person B then does something to get revenge, so now both people think the other person fired the first shot.

It's the Hatfields and McCoys, the Capulets and Motagues. As Red of OSP says, for all we know, someone pulled a prank three generations ago and it's been blood in the streets of Verona ever since. Or, if you prefer, the Great <Elven-Orkish>/<Orkish-Elven> War, fought for two thousand years because the Ork King tricked the Elf Queen into sitting on an egg.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Maybe. There's no reason to assume that there are more servants involved with this. In a castle, sure, there are lots of servants and the cooks(plural) wouldn't be involved in serving most of the time. In a private residence, the cook is probably also the server.

In any building that would be styled as a "château", you would have more than one servant. This isn't a Mrs. Hudson situation.

 

[pemerton]

Seems a little nitpicky to me. Is the 100% sim straw man going back into battle once more?

It's not about being "nitpicky". @TheFirebird said that the issues I mentioned don't arise in their games. And I replied.

Do you agree that knowledge checks violate "simulationist" causation? Or do you have a different way of handling them?

Also, not far upthread you posted this:

Always and never are absolutes, used in rhetoric for emphasis. They probably shouldn't be, but the more precise you make your language, the harder it is to make a clear point.

So sometimes you assert "always" and "never" , but don't mean it. But you criticise others for their departures from your preferred always and never.

 

[Maxperson]

Huh? When you invented the town, you did not expressly invent a farrier. Perhaps a farrier was implicit in its invention; but as I said, you could just as easily have stuck with the absence of a farrier and turned that into a plot point.

Why would I do that? I'm not running a narrative game. I'm not going to start inventing plots and such on the spot just because someone asked for the farrier.

But the farrier, even if perhaps implicit, is not entailed. It wouldn't contradict anything to have no farrier. "Confirming" the farrier is a creative, authorial decision; just as it would have been an authorial decision to affirm the absence of a farrier.

It wouldn't make sense for their to be no farrier. If there was some reason for the farrier to be absent, then I wouldn't have forgotten the farrier.

The farrier wasn't written down, until you wrote it down. Like the cook. Like the randomly encountered owlbear.

@Maxperson posted an example of play, way upthread, where:

• He as GM narrated the PCs arriving at a village;
• A player, as their PC, asked about the presence of a farrier in the village;'
• Maxperson had not made a note about a farrier in the village, but regarded this as an oversight, because logically there would be a farrier in the village;
• Maxperson therefore told the player that yes, their PC can find a farrier in the village.

My point is that Maxperson made up, at that moment of play, the existence of that farrier in that village.

And you're still wrong about that. The farrier existed the moment there was a town there. I simply recognized that fact when the player asked. Nothing was created in that moment.