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

[Lanefan]

I get what you're saying here, and, for a large amount I agree. Someone who just disrupts the game for the sake of disrupting the game is being a jerk.

OTOH, playing the game and always choosing the most rational, logical, advantageous option is not being true to a character either. The character should make choices that are different from what you might think are the best at the time. That's what being a character means. So, sure, while you, the player, absolutely know that that hooded woman is a medusa, sometimes, it's a lot more interesting in the game to act as if you don't.

I agree that being true to character is the best option. If I'm playing an unwise character (which I do fairly often, just for kicks) I'll often have it do something in a very "sub-optimal" manner, and not always to its own or anyone else's benefit.

But if I'm playing a wise character, the priorities are almost always:

1. Survival of self (I can't help anyone else if I'm dead)
2. Survival of companions, friends, and party members
3. Survival of innocent bystanders
4. Mission or goal achievement along, where there's a choice, a path of lesser (ideally, least) resistance.

Depending on the specific character the order above might change: for my faux-Roman mage it might go 1-4-2-3 where for my goody-good Cleric it might go 2-3-1-4 and my engineer Fighter it'd be more like 1-2-3-4.

And if that's pragmatic, well, so be it.

 

[Lanefan]

Are all your characters like this? Are none of them ruled by their passions?

Some are, to a point, but more ruled by their emotions than their passions. I avoid angsty introspection like the plague, however; I hate that crap in any form. This is orthagonal to the other things below; I've had emotional pragmatists and emotional gonzo types. The best character I've ever had was one of the latter: a low-Wisdom 3e version of an airhead Illusionist who wore her emotions on her sleeve and somehow just kept surviving where all around her didn't.

Are none of them addicted to danger?

Those are the gonzo ones: the ones who intentionally dive into the mouth of the man-swallowing monster because hey, it'll be easier to hurt it from the inside(1); the ones who cast Fireball while only hoping the blowback doesn't reach them and-or their allies(2); the ones who at raw 1st level throw down a challenge to a whole village of Kobolds and then face-charge the place(3), etc.

(1) - Lanefan the character did just this not very long ago; the foe was a great big frog-like demon with a mouth the size of a garage door, he killed it from the inside out (it teleported away from the rest of the party to stop them whaling on it but as he was already inside, he went with it) but boy was he a mess when they finally found him. Epic moment!
(2) - I've seen many a mage of this ilk and sometimes play one such myself: Wisdom 6 plus damaging A-o-E spells equals danger, Will Robinson!
(3) - I only got to DM this one. Dumb as hell on the characters' part but hella entertaining and amusing to play out, and we've a story to tell for ages.

Are none of them willing to put it all on the line for fortune and glory?

Fortune's no good if you're not around to spend it, and glory's just not that big a thing for most of us. (dying has some long-term risk in our games as, as per 1e, revival attempts don't come with success guaranteed and even if it does work you come back down a Con point)

 

[Lanefan]

Name me one RPG who if you play it, results in characters who have boring lives. Who never adventure. Who never encounter monsters and neat places. Who never have any kind of excitement.

So, you're looking for the Desert Bus of RPGs?

 

[FrogReaver]

No, I'm responding to posts confusing cause and effect.

To me it is abundantly apparent that a motive for choosing fail forward is an intent that characters take risks, but fail forward doesn't encourage that risk-taking (I've seen it encourage aversion to rolling) rather it makes that risk taking more sincere or consequential.

I don’t agree that the intent of fail forward is to get the characters to take risks.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You're the one making an absolute out of it, not me.

"Some answer which seems adequately reasonable and logical" still strongly suggests not standing straight into adversity when there's ways around it, and instead looking for those ways and putting them to use in order to achieve the same ends.

No, I am not. Bolded for emphasis:

I have absolutely now words for how much I hate this notion. It has poisoned almost all modern fiction. If you look at the great works of literature it is filled with instances of conflict between characters that do exclusively perfectly rational and pragmatic decissions given their set of values, and limited information. These are the parameters to tweak to create a interesting story for me. I am sic of dramas clearly based on some formulaic and obvious character flaw.

This was in response to someone else saying:

It's hard to create an interesting story around a character who always makes the most rational, pragmatic decision possible.

IOW, Enrahim was saying "characters need to always make the most rational, pragmatic decision possible", because anything else is bad. Hence, characters need to be played such that they always make the most rational, pragmatic choice possible.

It wasn't my argument that characters needed to be like that. Quite the opposite. I think that most people make the best approximation of rationality they can...and that that approximation is often loose even in favorable conditions.

 

[Enrahim]

I think this is an over-generalisation.

Romeo and Juliet. Les Miserables. The Great Gatsby. Howard's End. Just to name a few works that don't seem to conform to your statement.

I did not say all great works of literature. Though I see how I was not really precise and nuanced in my passion rant. Chalk it down to this thread not being a good story.

 

[Lanefan]

I did not say all great works of literature. Though I see how I was not really precise and nuanced in my passion rant. Chalk it down to this thread not being a good story.

This thread's now at 801 pages.

How many pages is War and Peace, and - far more important - can we beat it?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Let us just say: There are a couple different notions at play here.

One is your argument about how people actually work. This is the classic realism argument for justifying this notion of "flawed" characters. This is a perfectly valid concern to bring in when writing a story. Many want to read about realistic characters doing realistic things which includes a realistic dose of irrational actions. I just happen to not be one of them. And hence it is the notion that irrationality should be on the table for it to be a "good story" at all I am strongly against (even if softly described as just "being hard"). This mentality might be good for crafting a good story for some, but it is a recipe for breaking an otherwise good story for me.

Okay. But if it is a classic realism argument...

And numerous people in this thread are making realism arguments (often substituting other words which are, themselves, an attempt to avoid saying "realism" while still really just being realism in a trenchcoat) about their characters...

Where does that leave us?

The other is the notion of "most rational, pragmatic decision possible". This was as a reply to and contrasted to "make sense". There is a huge gap between your ultra genius autist and someone being sufficiently rational and pragmatic to only do things that "make sense". My objection was based on my understanding of the spirit of the entire quote I made, not to an extreme interpretation of the last sentence alone.

Bur you yourself continued that precise argument! You demanded that characters never be swayed by emotion, never have a lapse of judgment, never think something is more or less important than a dry accounting of the facts would indicate. That's what you argued: "conflict between characters that do exclusively perfectly rational and pragmatic decissions [sic] given their set of values, and limited information." (Emphasis in original.)

In other words: I do not see anything I disagree with in your post, beyond possibly some minor nit-pic I do not think is relevant to bring up.

Then I guess I don't understand what you mean by "do[ing] exclusively perfectly rational and pragmatic decisions", whatever limits one places thereon. Humans suck at being rational decision-machines. Huge swathes of human history have been defined by foolish choices. Hell, I have personally been responsible for damage and harm caused because I failed to rationally think through a decision and how it could affect others, how it could have consequences I would never willingly inflict. One such decision, I was extremely lucky that I did not literally kill or maim my younger sibling, and I was paying (mostly in labor but also in financial restitution from time to time) for that foolish decision for YEARS after I made it. It eventually got to the point where I demanded an end to the (effective) reparations, because I felt a decision I'd made more than a decade earlier when I wasn't even an adult yet, and which I had done repeated back-breaking labor to address, should not continue to haunt me for the rest of my life.

Besides that? Consider Venus getting sloppy drunk at a wedding party and imprisoning her son long after he had forgiven Psyche for her distrust and betrayal. Consider the absolute, unmitigated pettiness of Achilles in his tent while the Greeks are out there being slaughtered by the Trojans simply because somebody took his newest female conquest away. Or Set killing his brother Osiris (in public, mind, so everyone knew who did it) to usurp the throne. Or the myth of Midas, who asked for a wish that even a young child could see would end in tragedy. Or if we reach back all the way to the oldest work of literature known to mankind, to the many, many stupid and reckless things Gilgamesh does both before and after he meets Enkidu. "Otherwise smart/powerful/successful person has a horrendous lapse of judgment/does something profoundly stupid" is literally as old as literature itself.

Given I have lived this experience, and it is found woven through tales as old as writing itself, I'm not sure what I should make of the suggestion that the "great works" of literature are so full of exclusively rational people making only the best, most pragmatic, most logical choices, even when filtered through their values systems and degree of informed-ness.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This thread's now at 801 pages.

How many pages is War and Peace, and - far more important - can we beat it?

It's a bit shy of 590k words in English translations (it varies but we'll shoot for a higher value to be sure).

If an average page has at least a thousand words, we've already exceeded it. Of course, some pages are very short in this thread, but some are not. Any page where I have more than one post is practically guaranteed to be multiple thousands of words

 

[Hussar]

I do my best to make the logical choice for them. Even if I decide their judgement is clouded because of who they are. That's a big part of roleplaying. Not sure how you took anything I've said to indicate otherwise.

On the other hand I don't want artificial restrictions and prompts created by game rules making those decisions for me. If my character does something I wouldn't do because the rules say they should those decisions would be meaningless to me. I would no longer be method acting, I would feel like I was following a script.

I suppose, at the end of the day, this is why things like morale rules don't apply to PC's. I believe that they should. I absolutely believe that PC's should be affected by Persuasion checks (or whatever the system uses) and the system should reward players who do so.