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

[hawkeyefan]

Yes, in this sense:

Well, that's not the principle as described. That's some stuff you said and then put the same label on it.

but not in this sense:

or in the sense monsterhearts define it ref D&D General - [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

Okay... so what about the text from Monsterhearts that was sahred by @Campbell do you disagree with or see as flawed?

 

[Enrahim]

No I don't. We've all been posting here and discussing each other's ideas for a LONG time! You've been posting for 5 years now, according to your profile, but Lanefan, myself, and many of the others here go back, in my case, getting close to 20 years. He knows he's using a form of excluded middle to warp the concept of 'make their lives interesting' into something that sounds ridiculous. He knows this. I assure you he knows this. Nothing I'm saying is stupid, and while he may literally have just taken what was posted, he knows a good bit of the context. It was a hamfisted rhetorical ploy, and it got him nothing. I'm not sure why he bothered. Maybe he's attempting to work towards some actual point by going way off in left field first, and then walking it back. I guess we'll see.

You might be knowing Lanefan. But you do not know me. I just pointed out to you that I as well manage to read that passage the way @Lanefan described. Indeed imagining myself coming from a purely trad background I could fully see myself reading this and find the idea as ridiculous as you seem to find this reading, and hence stear wide away from the concept.

By the way I never claimed you said anything stupid. My use of "stupid" was refering to seeking out trouble, and linking it to the quote.

What I wanted to point out was that the way the concept was described in the isolated quote you gave could be unfortunate. You are the a better judge than me at what Lanefan's motives might be. But the way I read their post did not exclude that they might have had that motivation as well.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Player: "I spend 75 g.p. reloading my basic gear and equipment to the original amounts and conditions on my character sheet - full quivers, full rations, replace a few bits showing wear and tear, that sort of thing."
DM: "OK. Chalk off the 75. If you're looking for anything more pricey, check the equipment guide for prices and take care of it on your own while I sort out what Jocasta's doing."

Boom. Done.

When I have suggested keeping this kind of thing brief in the past (earlier in this very thread, though likely weeks ago now), you always lament about the lost opportunities for roleplaying and something interesting to emerge.

Why the seeming change of heart?

 

[Lanefan]

Possibly. Does Mothership tell the DM to be a neutral arbiter? Some RPGs want the DM to be a fan of the players, which is not being a neutral arbiter.

To be fussy, they want the DM to be a fan of the characters.

I agree it's not neutral, but then they seen to define "fan" differently than I (and maybe lots of others) would.

The actual advice is to make the results of failure interesting.

And-or exciting.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This example is all good, and could work in any game I think. I could easily see any of those (except maybe the last one) playing out in my game were I to run a situation like that.

The bolded is the key element, though: the fundamental action still fails.

It's when the rolled failure of the fundamental action is turned into a narrated success that the concept falls flat for me.

I don't think there's a version of FF that demands no failures. The example you were responding to seems to me to be pretty solid. Honestly? Where FF gets less easy to apply is when we're dealing with very atomic little actions that don't carry any of the weight of the context with them. "You fail to pick the lock" as an isolated atom of fiction doesn't really leave much to be worked with, and if you absolutely insist that every instant of play be fully diegetic within itself, so that you can't bring in concerns from the larger context, then how would you do FF? You can't! I mean, you CAN, but then the only option you have is to say "OK, you picked the lock, but someone heard you." Like, you kind of create your own issues, which is fine, do what you want, but don't attribute the limitations of those techniques to other concepts, like FF. FF works great!

And I'd also just add that the example you're responding to really begs to be a more fully-fleshed-out resolution system, like Skill Challenges ala 4e D&D or something. That way you don't really have to worry as much about this context, it is supplied. A check to see if you ran quickly enough fails, it has consequences, but the SC continues, you can still see the bad guy, he's just far ahead of you, or you know the general way he's gone. Eventually you get to the 'failed the SC' point and THEN FF considerations really apply, but this is a much bigger higher abstraction thing that's failed, so it is much easier to use its extensive context to find 'hooks' that lead on to further action in the same general direction (IE whatever the goal was for catching the guy).

 

[Faolyn]

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.

And for the last time, many of us have said that this was a bad example. Why do you keep bringing it up like it's the end-all and be-all of fail forward design?

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, all I'm saying here is that your envelope as Little Lord Fontleroy is a bit different shape than that of Sam the Gardner, but they can both be equally pushed, and for equally rewarding play. You are not magically going to have more fun as one or the other. This is the sense in which I want you to distinguish between player and character. The player's goals are NOT the character's goals, because the player exists at a whole other level where the REASONS FOR PLAYING and its rewards exist, which cannot be goals of the character, as imagined.

Now, you want the player to inhabit the character and not think about 'player stuff', but the character still exists, as it is constructed, with regard to that player stuff, EXCLUSIVELY. So, again, being the player of the rich and powerful Lord, or of the lowly Gardner, is largely immaterial. The Lord, fictionally, may have more fun chasing sexy princesses and eating caviar than the Gardner who's too poor to do much besides get a tank at the alehouse every Friday night. But playing them is, potentially, equally rewarding for whomever wants those experiences.

By this understanding, it literally just makes no sense at all to be concerned about who plays what. Again, this is all modulus they all engage in good principled play and respect each other's fun at the table (again a table issue, not related to characters). And again, there could be genre/trope/tone/premise reasons why everyone is dirt poor, or fabulously wealthy, or such considerations are irrelevant (as they are in, say, most supers play).

Unless I'm missing something, I think I more or less agree with this in principle.

That said, there's always going to be players who get resentful at what they perceive as mechanical imbalance between characters, and D&D has gone a long way toward catering to these players via things like point-buy or array stat generation instead of rolling, removal of a lot of baked-in species-based advantages or drawbacks in order to make the playable species all more equal, milestone or story-based levelling instead of individual xp, and so on.

I'm not a fan of these changes; I much prefer that to a certain extent you play what the dice give you and that - like real life - some characters at the start of their adventuring careers simply have more going for them than others. That said, it does help to have a system and-or playstyle where characters come and go halfway regularly (i.e. you're not likely to be stuck with the same one for the whole campaign) and where starting stats etc. don't have all that much say over projected career length.

 

[Enrahim]

Well, that's not the principle as described. That's some stuff you said and then put the same label on it.



Okay... so what about the text from Monsterhearts that was sahred by @Campbell do you disagree with or see as flawed?

I think my main problem come down to this constellation of sentences.
"But being their advocate doesn’t mean it’s your job to keep them safe. It’s not. It’s your job to make their life not boring."
In one way I cannot say straight out that I disagree. I think I could manage to construe a meaning from this collection of words I could agree with. However I can also construe this to mean several things I disagree with a passion about. So this ambiguity is the flaw.

In particular the interpretation that safety measures for the character is in no way your job as a player is a bit hard to avoid. Also the ramifications of what you can or should do to do the "job" the advocacy is claimed to entail is up for extreme levels of interpretation. The surrounding text is too fuzzy for me to extract any solid boundaries for this, and the boundiaries I would find "acceptable" would be very strict indeed.

I could easily imagine a player (mis)reading this piece of "advice" and come to my game behaving in a way that might almost completely ruin my enjoyment of the game.

 

[Maxperson]

It's a ridiculous concept that someone picking a lock could make more or less noise? That the noise made when doing something related to skullduggery is important?

It's a ridiculous concept that a master thief becomes a keystone cop over a failure. The failure wouldn't be that severe for a master thief.

You're adding in all kinds of qualifiers here. Suddenly it's a master thief and the failure isn't just enough noise to alert soemone, but is keystone cop buffoonery. Like I've said before... if you wanted to make a ruling in this situation and describe things in a keystone cop kind of way, be my guest. I'll just continue to handle it in sensible ways that work for the fiction and for the participants.

We've been talking about a highly skilled thief for hundreds of pages. That's one of the big problems we have over here on my side of things. PC skill make it more or less likely that a cook will be in the kitchen at 2am.

Who said a ton of noise? It's enough to be heard by someone nearby.

A master thief will not make appreciably more noise on a failure.

No, that's not what I'm saying. This is more semantics.

And this is a dodge.

Do you think that given the facts that you've not read the book, have not played any games that have this principle, haven't played games that have similar principles, and folks who have are describing it differently... none of this even gives you pause to think perhaps you've misunderstood? That perhaps you don't understand the thing better than those who have actual experience with it?

Does that thought even cross your mind as like a possibility?

How could I possibly not understand that every PCs life in every game isn't boring, because designers don't design boring games?

Okay. Tell me how the characters lives will be interesting by default without action from the players or GM to make it so.

I'm curious what you have in mind here.

Because games are designed to be fun. You don't need a useless and redundant principle to accomplish that.

So how is that against the principle of "make the characters' lives not boring?

Because there's no such principle, or at least not one that every RPG ever made doesn't have as the basis for playing it.

Is the principle to not make the character's life boring, which is the default state for every RPG and doesn't need a special call out? Or is the principle to make the results of actions interesting, which is very different from making a character's life not boring? Because those are two completely different principles.

The game you are quoting conflates a non-boring life with interesting results.

 

[Lanefan]

When I have suggested keeping this kind of thing brief in the past (earlier in this very thread, though likely weeks ago now), you always lament about the lost opportunities for roleplaying and something interesting to emerge.

Why the seeming change of heart?

Pemerton wanted to know what 10 seconds of inventory management might look like. I chucked in an example.

As DM, I'm fine with a player doing it that way and also fine if they want to get into more detail with it. After very low level, IME, they rarely if ever want to go into much detail unless they're trying to find something unusual or expensive that may not be easily available e.g. a very good small compass or a high-mag spyglass.