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

[FrogReaver]

Even more specifically: it's not left there dangling as a sentence and a "ok cool, figure out how to do this." It's defined with explicit guidance around how to run the game (and what not to do) to achieve that goal, and then you're provided with a long list of GM Principles and Moves that help you structure your side of the conversation to achieve that. It's often easy to pick apart the surface bold line directives of a PBTA (eg: something like "begin and end with the fiction" is actually really confusing for people picking a game like this up for the first time, thankfully games which say that also ya know, define what it means), but you could ask what the game means by that if you're not familiar with it instead of assuming it's something as facile as it appears.

So part of it is that people bring up those single bold line directives into discussions where others don’t have that additional context. There’s no wonder those conversations go badly.

 

[zakael19]

So part of it is that people bring up those single bold line directives into discussions where others don’t have that additional context. There’s no wonder those conversations go badly.

Yeah, that's fair - although I'm pretty sure it's been defined multiple times throughout the years with this specific crew of back and forthers; inclusive of me sharing the version that Stonetop uses with context on a page where everybody still participating had a back and forth about it.

 

[AlViking]

The rules don't need to spell everything out, because the writers assume that the players and GM have an imagination. For instance, if you fail a stealth check, the rules don't say how. But you probably wouldn't use the following:

View attachment 410489

Instead you'd say something like "I stepped on a twig." Even if a twig hadn't been previously established.


I also added the lock to the kitchen door, and the kitchen itself. Adding a cook is no different or strange.


Because you did a bad enough job picking the lock that your actions alerted the cook. You didn't

You can, of course, still have the cook scream when someone enters the kitchen, even if they didn't hear the lock being picked. However, because the sound of the lock being very poorly picked didn't alert the cook, they're not paying undue attention to the door, leaving the PCs open to try to silence the cook in one way or another.


The sand is the fail-forward--the room is slowly filling with sand because they didn't completely disable the trap. If they had a full success on the roll, thus completely disabling the trap, they wouldn't be dealing with the sand.

Also, the chest and trap are unconnected, beyond the fact that they're in the same area. Picking the lock, breaking the chest, ignoring the chest and moving on doesn't affect the trap in any way. It's not an Indiana Jones thing where they have to deal with the chest in a specific way to avoid spring the trap, after all.


That's fine. That's still part of fail forward.


The point of fail forward is to make sure the game doesn't stop moving, and especially so the GM always provides other options. Since there was still the long way around, the game didn't stop moving.

But let's assume that failure to find the passageway would grind the game to a halt. OK: someone else enters the area. If the PCs run rather than fight, they may get herded to a potentially useful location. If they fight, they might find a key on one of the bodies that doesn't fit a known lock.


Here's the problem. You gated the event behind a single die roll. This is what fail forward is designed to prevent.

So one thing to do is to decide how many pertinent bits of information are in the papers. Let's say there are five. On a successful roll, they get all five pieces. On a partial success, they get three. On a total failure, they get one. It doesn't have to be those exact numbers. Maybe a partial success is two pieces, or four.

To make it fairer, you could number the pieces of info and then ask them to choose the numbers.


Which is literally a type of partial success.

For the last time, the cook was only added because of the failure in the example I provided. If the cook was always there I see no reason the cook would hear a failed attempt but not a successful one. As well as ... you know what. It doesn't matter. There's nothing new here.

Yes I occasionally allow for partial success, I never said otherwise. Sometimes the characters fail to achieve their goals, such is life. A single failure has never led to the end of a campaign nor has it ever left the characters with nothing to do. I don't gate larger goals behind a single roll, individual steps to achieve those goals could be gated behind a single roll.

I do not care about moving the story forward as a GM. All I care about is building interesting worlds, opponents, allies, opportunities. I judge the results of an attempted action based only on the action taken. If the outcome of a declared action is uncertain I call for a roll. I don't consider goals, narrative, story, whether or not it will be "boring". I can tell you that my players enjoy my game, are rarely if ever bored, if they get a bit frustrated sometimes it only makes their eventual success more meaningful.

That's pretty much all I have to say, summed up. We have different approaches for different groups and game systems.

 

[AlViking]

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.

The characters always do the most rational, logical, advantageous thing is a strawman. I do my best to have my character do what they believe to be the most rational, logical, advantageous thing from their perspective and knowledge. Sometimes that means that my barbarian walks off in search of danger while others in the group are talking about what to do next because to him the most rational approach is to kick in the door and see what happens. It's logical to him that the gods reward bravery and action. The advantageous thing to do when faced with an enemy is to hit them with a big pointy metal stick until they stop being an enemy. I regularly know what monsters we're facing are but if I'm unsure what my character would know I ask the GM.

My barbarian doesn't wander off all the time or always start fights because I still want to respect the decisions of my fellow players, I don't want to be a jerk and destroy the fun their having. But sometimes (especially if they're suffering from analysis paralysis) I look at my fellow players and say "Sorry about this" and then describe something stupid my barbarian is doing to the GM.

 

[AlViking]

In a previous thread some posters testified to reduced feelings of immersion in exploring a setting they themselves created. I cited Tolkien's letter to Auden describing his sense of exploring his own creation, but it didn't land for them.

I experimented with this over several sessions with different players recently, and most loved it while a few bounced off it. Too small a study to observe norms (a dozen players), but I noticed individual tolerances that techniques should take into account. Although Harper confined his observations to AW, his "line" seemed to also speak to this in identifying some detectable differences between cases of setting establishment.

When I create a world as GM, I do feel immersed in it and for me that is a motivating satisfaction. I investigate it from within as an intangible avatar of curiosity and wonder. Not continuously, but submerging into it and climbing out betimes, to deliberate.

When I'm GMing and world building or planning for a session, sometimes during the session when I'm running an NPC things will develop that I had not anticipated. It's part of being creative. The same thing happens when I'm playing a character as well, suddenly I'll find myself saying or doing something without really thinking about it or thinking ahead because I'm really into my character and it just sort of comes out. It's kind of awesome when that happens.

But mix the two? Mix the two and for me both sides of the equation suffer. I accept that it doesn't happen that way for some people but different people react differently. I accept that some things will work for me but not for thee, all I ask is that other people do the same.

 

[pemerton]

For rising action/conflict
1) Does it matter how long in real time any event in that sequence lasts? (I don’t think so but maybe you disagree). What if the inventory management was 10 seconds instead of 2 hours? Does that change anything?

Of course. I quoted Edwards talking about pages detailing military hardware. I drew the analogy to Warhol's Sleep. I have repeatedly talked about a significant amount of time being spent on matters such as logistics, inventory management and the like.

I'm not sure what 10 seconds of inventory management looks like, though.

2) Would your concept of rising action/conflict include any series of events that go from event A lower action/conflict to event B as higher action/conflict to event Z as the highest action/conflict? Must every event in the sequence go from lower to higher?

3) What if the 2 hours of inventory management was a component of a component? Say for the purposes of some rising conflict we don’t associate the 2 hours of inventory management as a separate event, but as part of one of the events in the rising action sequence. If you think that should be treated as a component of one of the events in the sequence of rising action/conflict then how do we determine when something is an event vs a component of an event?

The concept of "rising action" or "rising conflict" is not invented by me, or by Vincent Baker. I'm not trained in criticism, but as I understand it, "rising action" is a fairly common notion to use in analysing fiction (literature and film).

To what extent you can sustain and then release tension; relax or intensify the pacing; etc, and still maintain rising action, is a matter of (i) skill and (ii) taste/inclination.

 

[pemerton]

So fail-forward is about railroading? Of course that's not what you mean, but pursuing dramatic narrative has been observed to be in tension with playing game as game. Kim, for instance, discusses this.

Apocalypse World works around a soft move/hard move structure.

Burning Wheel works around intent + task resolution.

These are ways of establishing an implicit trajectory of threat and promise. They are also what makes "fail forward" work in those RPGs.

 

[pemerton]

I've never seen it used that way in GM'd play, and am curious to know which game texts codify it?

If you look through the first couple of pages of this thread, you'll see plenty of examples of this usage.

 

[Campbell]

I do not think that games like Monsterhearts or Apocalypse World expect you to play irrational characters. I think they expect you to play characters who are emotionally impacted by their experiences. Part of that is affecting others using emotions carries the risk of your character being emotionally affected. What they expect players to do is play people and like sit in the pocket of their character in the moment instead of taking a more top-down problem-solving perspective.

If people want to consider that stupid they are welcome to, but I think that makes most people stupid.

 

[Campbell]

I think we should be careful to avoid confusing playing game as game with playing game as game in the way we are used to. Scene framing techniques and action resolution which relies on GMs bringing in new elements from unfixed bits of potential fiction mean that you cannot approach the game as an exploration-oriented game in the same way you would AD&D, but that does not mean it cannot be approached as a game you can play skillfully. Blades in the Dark has a very well-developed game layer that still relies on fictional positioning skill against GM telegraphed threats and knowledge of the risks involved. It's just not the same sort of game as game you experience as AD&D.

I should clarify a number of designs are actively trying to get away from game as game. Monsterhearts certainly is. Not in the sense that fictional positioning does not matter, but in the sense that the game rewards failing and fulling under other people's influence. You could have game as game wrapped around strings, but the game rewards putting yourself in vulnerable positions.