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

[bloodtide]

After the character's been played even for just a few sessions, however, everyone else at the table has the patterns, personality, maybe alignment, etc. you've established in play to measure against.

The advantage of this is that you can use those first few sessions to determine if what you've got in your head is going to work out at all well in play, and - before you've locked yourself in too much - tweak accordingly if it isn't.

So, for a long time now I have used the idea that the first few game sessions for a character are fluid.

I have seen so many players come over with some "great" idea for a character.....and hate it after just a few hours.

As I play Hard Fun Unfair Unbalanced Old School style, it is very common for PCs to die. And also common for the player to come back as "Fred II", basically the character that just died but with a tweak or two

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Passive perception is still a stealth check, it's just not rolled. In both passive and active situations, perception still controls the situation in 5e. I don't have the 5.5e PHB, but I recall not liking the stealth mechanics for the new half-edition. I like about half of the changes, but not the other half and stealth was in the half I disliked.

Right, the 2014 system is basically lifted straight from 4e. You roll a Stealth check and whatever that result is, that's the DC of a Perception check, passive or active, required to see, or at least detect, you. That being said, the GM has a bunch of leeway in terms of whether you meet the requirements for concealment or not, etc.

 

[Maxperson]

Right, the 2014 system is basically lifted straight from 4e. You roll a Stealth check and whatever that result is, that's the DC of a Perception check, passive or active, required to see, or at least detect, you. That being said, the GM has a bunch of leeway in terms of whether you meet the requirements for concealment or not, etc.

4e took that from 3e. The only real difference was that in 3e it wasn't stealth, it was hide and move silently vs. spot and listen.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So it's not that I took issue with your stating that only children would have an issue, it's that I'm stuck in the 70s! That's oh so much better.

I've had experience with games where one person had a character of privilege as well (taking the Noble background to too much of an extreme most recently) and at one point we sat the GM down and said that it was making the game less fun for the rest of us. I'm glad if your experience has been different but it does not resemble mine for multiple reasons.

Look, I wasn't there and won't pretend to know what was going on. OTOH I do think it's very likely that the player being complained about was misbehaving. It just strikes me as very odd to attribute that behavior to a detail of their character. A sober evaluation of the situation is very likely to reveal that you've inverted cause and effect here. He was portraying his character in a certain way in order to be an arse. But there's a billion ways to do that. Outlawing one of them is not really a fix. In this case, maybe it served as a clue hammer and he shaped up, but then forever banning entire possible backstories serves no real purpose.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It's not that what I do works for me, continues to work for my players (mix of young, old, experienced with multiple games, only ever play D&D), it's that I cling to outdated processes. Because there are better ways of doing things - after all you do those better things so you know what works better for everyone!

I never said this applies to you. I said it’s something I’ve observed.

You continue to read things into my posts that are not there. I’ve pointed it out several times. Please stop doing that.

Nobody has said otherwise, quite the opposite in fact. Collaborative world building works for some people and the DMG mentions it. I prefer games where we don't do it.

This is the post to which I was replying:

Also, the claim is not that the slave traders using human ears is less 'real' or 'true'. They both have the same status in the fiction. It is that giving that narrative control to the players makes it more difficult for the players to immerse themselves as their characters. For example, because it heightens the PC/player distinction.

This to me reads as if it’s meant to be true of all players.

There's a difference between resolving uncertainty with the roll of a dice than causing something unrelated to happen because of a failure.

But as has been explained to you many times, the cook is not unrelated to the lock picking. And fail forward, when used well, doesn’t involve “unrelated” things.

This is stating the obvious. That without other indications, an external observer must rely on an external metric. But that’s a far narrower scope than the post I replied to implied.

Okay. If it’s obvious, then how would anyone ever determine that someone else is playing their character either faithfully or unfaithfully?

Yup. Nothing insulting about telling someone their play is "obsolete", right?

That’s not what I said, Micah. Stop stirring the pot.

 

[The Firebird]

This to me reads as if it’s meant to be true of all players.

It wasn't.

 

[pemerton]

So question on this: would you think a Seek Insight/Discern Realities (I forget, are you familiar with Dungeon world?) roll where the player says "wait, there's runes on the wall? I'd like to see if they contain any clues about the way out of here" and then roll a 7-9 and pick "what's useful or valuable to me" and the GM goes "ok yeah, so you puzzle over the runes for a bit and realize that they're a set of pictographic landmark directions that will like, kinda get you back on track?" as bad? Because generally when my players roll either Seek Insight or Know Things they're starting from a "I Hope..." position (are there tracks? what's the weakness here? what happens if I let this creature out?...etc).

This seems right to me, and seems pretty close to what @AbdulAlhazred posted upthread about Discern Realities, looking for something useful, and finding a secret passage.

 

[pemerton]

I do actually think IAWA uses dice to resolve conflicts, it uses a system called the Anthology Engine. In the AE there are three conditions, shamed, injured, exhausted. Any given game uses two of them, so you could have a pure social game using exhausted and shamed.

I'm not familiar with the Anthology Engine, just the In A Wicked Age rulebook.

My comment about talking is based on this from p 12:

Roll dice when one character undertakes to do some concrete thing, and another character can and would try to interfere. Every player with a character involved, including you as GM, rolls dice for their own character. If you have more than one NPC involved, roll separate dice for each.

Don’t roll dice when two characters are having a conversation, no matter how heated it becomes; wait until one or the other acts.​

I think I get what it is doing. But I've stumbled over it a few times when GMing.

 

[AlViking]

I never said this applies to you. I said it’s something I’ve observed.

You continue to read things into my posts that are not there. I’ve pointed it out several times. Please stop doing that.



This is the post to which I was replying:


This to me reads as if it’s meant to be true of all players.



But as has been explained to you many times, the cook is not unrelated to the lock picking. And fail forward, when used well, doesn’t involve “unrelated” things.



Okay. If it’s obvious, then how would anyone ever determine that someone else is playing their character either faithfully or unfaithfully?



That’s not what I said, Micah. Stop stirring the pot.

Your posts can come across as "this is the way" whether you intend it or not. You include things like "...true of some folks’ processes of play. They continue using some processes out of habit..." if that doesn't apply to anyone else, why include it?

As far as the rest I was just stating my opinion. I'm not offended by random people on the internet, I'm just giving my take on the issues raised.

 

[AlViking]

Look, I wasn't there and won't pretend to know what was going on. OTOH I do think it's very likely that the player being complained about was misbehaving. It just strikes me as very odd to attribute that behavior to a detail of their character. A sober evaluation of the situation is very likely to reveal that you've inverted cause and effect here. He was portraying his character in a certain way in order to be an arse. But there's a billion ways to do that. Outlawing one of them is not really a fix. In this case, maybe it served as a clue hammer and he shaped up, but then forever banning entire possible backstories serves no real purpose.

In a group game, a power imbalance can cause issues. In my experience the type of player that wants to have some advantage like that tends to also be the type of person that will abuse it whether they realize they realize it or not. If the entire group agrees during session 0 that it would be interesting to have 1 character be the son of someone important and everyone wants to deal with the political baggage and intrigue that character brings to the campaign I could see it work.

But thanks for letting me know that I, and the rest of the group other than the player in question, were simply not capable of making a sober judgement.