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

[hawkeyefan]

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.

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.

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

We've been talking about a thief. You've just recently added the "master" designation.

PC skill doesn't make the cook more or less likely to be there, it makes it more or less likely for her to hear the efforts made to pick the lock. This has been explained so many times now.

And this is a dodge.

It's not. I said I don't agree. "One step removed is not direct" doesn't make sense to me. I've already explained that someone hearing noise I make is a direct result of me making the noise.

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

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

What are you talking about? You're basically advocating FOR the principle.

Games are designed to be fun, sure, but there are times that doesn't work out to be the case. A game can certainly be boring. And the game isn't interesting on its own... it needs the players and the GM to make it interesting.

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.

No one has said that it exists for every game. It is a principle in certain specific games. It is advice to the players and GMs of those games... Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts are the ones that have been mentioned, but there are others as well. Not all PbtA games have it though.

This is why your denial of the principle as even existing is just silly. It clearly exists. We can open those books and read it. It was posted from Monsterhearts earlier in the thread by @Campbell .

You took it as a criticism of D&D for some odd reason and now you're ranting about how games are inherently fun and so the characters' lives are inherently not boring... and it makes no sense.

 

[Enrahim]

Did you read the rules text that I quoted?

Fair question. Yes I read the rule text before, but on revisit noticed I didn't properly read the context you quoted it into. Your excelent answer to SableWyvern just after this post covered what I was getting at as well.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Can a referee be a fan of a sportsman and still be a neutral arbiter?
Can a father be a fan of their kid and still discipline their child when need be?

I think the idea of "fan" as it applies to "be a fan of the characters" is more the way we can be a fan of a fictional character rather than a sports team.

Like with a fictional character, we're pulling for them... we want them to make it... we want to see them pull through in the end. But we also want them to be in peril, right? We want to see them go through the wringer a bit.

We want conflict. We want the characters' lives to be interesting because then we get to see them face adversity and be tested. We're hoping they pass the test, but either way, we're watching and pulling for them.

I think this is an important difference in the type of fan that we should be thinking of in this context. Being a Yankee fan and wanting to watch them pummel the Red Sox 26 to nothing after 5 innings is a different thing than being a fan of Frodo or Luke Skywalker or Hawkeye or whoever.

 

[hawkeyefan]

And I realise now I can give you one concrete as well...... LEEEEEEEROY JENKINS!!!!!!!!

So you don't want something like that? One of the most memorable moments in gaming history?

 

[AnotherGuy]

I think the idea of "fan" as it applies to "be a fan of the characters" is more the way we can be a fan of a fictional character rather than a sports team.

Like with a fictional character, we're pulling for them... we want them to make it... we want to see them pull through in the end. But we also want them to be in peril, right? We want to see them go through the wringer a bit.

We want conflict. We want the characters' lives to be interesting because then we get to see them face adversity and be tested. We're hoping they pass the test, but either way, we're watching and pulling for them.

I think this is an important difference in the type of fan that we should be thinking of in this context. Being a Yankee fan and wanting to watch them pummel the Red Sox 26 to nothing after 5 innings is a different thing than being a fan of Frodo or Luke Skywalker or Hawkeye or whoever.

Ah I see my error! I focused on the neutral arbiter hence using referee and father examples instead of looking for an example of how the word fan was intended to be seen. I did think of the literary characters but summarily (and incorrectly) dismissed them for the shallow comparison between author and GM.

 

[hawkeyefan]

And how in the first use of the term, spell levels and character levels are not the same thing or gained at the same rates (in all but one D&D edition), despite the underlying meaning being similar.

The point is more that shorthand terminology that needs interpreting in the context of the rest of the text is entirely normal in RPGs, and always has been.

You know what also helps? The fact that we've read the texts and therefore understand the concepts of what "level" can mean. And even still... it can cause confusion in conversation.

Now... imagine we didn't read the book and have at best a second-hand understanding of the context, and yet for some reason, feel the need to make strong assertions about it!

 

[clearstream]

Misclick

 

[clearstream]

Twice

 

[Enrahim]

So you don't want something like that? One of the most memorable moments in gaming history?

Right Edit: would you?

 

[TwoSix]

I can understand how many find that (much) more exciting than my prefered kind of game. After all, even from early preeteen I recognised I was quite unusual in prefering long form chess over blitz.

For sure. If you're looking for play that's more like 5 minutes per turn chess over blitz chess, then we're definitely going to be looking for different tools. Outside of a few, very deliberate, experiments with OSR-style play, slow and cautious play is exactly what I'm looking to excise from my games.