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

[Hussar]

It's not mind control to hit my character with a sword but - unless the blow puts me down for the count or worse - it is mind control to tell me how I react to the pain that hit causes.

Physical vs mental.

We have to abstract the physical side of any RPG (a bit less so in a LARP), and thus the dice come in and tell us what happens.

We do NOT have to abstract the mental side of things except in rare circumstances, because the PCs come with thinking players attached and the NPCs have a GM to do their thinking. Thus, dice are unnecessary there.

I'm sorry, but there are all sorts of games that do exactly that. You get hit, take damage, and the mechanics tell you how you react to the pain. Heck, even 5e has things like Vex which grants advantage on your next attack or disadvantage to enemies for their first attack. What exactly do you think that means? Why does hitting someone with a longsword give them disadvantage on their next attack?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm sorry, but there are all sorts of games that do exactly that. You get hit, take damage, and the mechanics tell you how you react to the pain. Heck, even 5e has things like Vex which grants advantage on your next attack or disadvantage to enemies for their first attack. What exactly do you think that means? Why does hitting someone with a longsword give them disadvantage on their next attack?

I would be extremely surprised if Lanefan has a positive reaction to knowing this, as IIRC he does not play 5e and has a skeptical view of many things it does. Might be better to give examples from one of the TSR editions.

 

[Emerikol]

I don’t know. I’m asking you because I don’t recall you having commented on it. Feel free to comment on either.

For number 2, I don’t think I agree about what’s in peoples’ minds before hand. But I also think that there are different approaches and it doesn’t really make sense to judge one approach according to the criteria of the other.

I was asking what the debate, that was ongoing here, was about. I came in late so I was just trying to be sure I knew what exactly are we debating?

I think with number 2 I was just saying that we've all had our say on such things. Some like a more PbtA style game or with elements of that style (perhaps more limited but still elements), and others dislike the whole idea.

 

[AnotherGuy]

In fairness, I've DMed and played with one or two players who seemed constitutionally incapable of doing anything the least bit gonzo, and always tried their best to analyze down to the best/most optimal option. Great for their characters' survival odds, awful for the entertainment value.

This kind of play, I feel, is fostered because of D&D where the overwhelming real consequence in the game is PC Death (even for NPCs). Lesser consequences are mitigated or ignored in service to the Hit Point god.
So rational (always optimal) decision making is rewarded.

EDIT: Thus you have reports of players behaving this way or that way and the constant discussions about min/maxers.
It is why I provided another track for level progression through roleplaying decision points via Traits, Bonds, Flaws, Ideals.
Focusing on emotional struggle, character growth, playing into flaws, making hard decisions, providing other meaningful consequences that stand on their own away from the Hit Point god.

50 years and this is the best the designers can do....I guess I shouldn't complain, it is a war-game at the end of the day. But I feel they should advertise that more. War-game disguised as a Roleplaying-game. Sorry rant over.

 

[Maggan]

I came in late so I was just trying to be sure I knew what exactly are we debating?

No one knows.

Or at least, it seems to me that there are several things being discussed at the same time. For a while it was the conservatism of D&D players, then a lot of talk about fail forward in all its forms, now it seems to be talking about whether a player can be forced to take actions based on a negative roll. Oh yeah, there's some talk about the importance of not playing a boring game, which it seems that no one is claiming to do.

So just pick a thread of discussion that interest you!

For me, the fail forward thing has been the most interesting thing to follow.

 

[kayakingpoodle]

No one knows.

Or at least, it seems to me that there are several things being discussed at the same time. For a while it was the conservatism of D&D players, then a lot of talk about fail forward in all its forms, now it seems to be talking about whether a player can be forced to take actions based on a negative roll. Oh yeah, there's some talk about the importance of not playing a boring game, which it seems that no one is claiming to do.

So just pick a thread of discussion that interest you!

For me, the fail forward thing has been the most interesting thing to follow.

Don't forget the my way or the highway even though I don't play D&D crowd lol.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This kind of play, I feel, is fostered because of D&D where the overwhelming real consequence in the game is PC Death (even for NPCs). Lesser consequences are mitigated or ignored in service to the Hit Point god.
So rational (always optimal) decision making is rewarded.

This is a huge part of why I am such a cautious player myself, and why I have put in a great deal of effort into making sure my players know that they won't have their ability to participate in the game, nor the character-story they're interested in exploring, ripped away merely because of a stupid die roll or whatever. There will always be consequences, and their characters might go through terrible, terrible things (after all, did not Jafar teach us "There are things so much worse than death!"? Low-quality movie oveall, Return of Jafar, but that refrain is one of its brighter points.)

D&D taught me that if I don't play as cautiously and carefully as possible, it can and always will piss in my cheerios, give me a wedgie, and throw sand in my eyes.

EDIT: Thus you have reports of players behaving this way or that way and the constant discussions about min/maxers.
It is why I provided another track for level progression through roleplaying decision points via Traits, Bonds, Flaws, Ideals.
Focusing on emotional struggle, character growth, playing into flaws, making hard decisions, providing other meaningful consequences that stand on their own away from the Hit Point god.

50 years and this is the best the designers can do....I guess I shouldn't complain, it is a war-game at the end of the day. But I feel they should advertise that more. War-game disguised as a Roleplaying-game. Sorry rant over.

No, I think you're bang on with this. D&D fans like to think that it's totally not that, but...the way the rules are made, it is. And it's one of the reasons why the hatred of things like Skill Challenges and other 4e design elements (like actually balanced classes) irritates the hell out of me. Those very things were trying to make D&D be NOT "literally still just a wargame in a funny hat", and people who claim to see D&D as something else hated them for it. It just...it boggles my mind how unreservedly attached people are to everything being shackled to the Hit Point God, as you put it, to everything being so thoroughly about "don't mess up or everything you've worked for will be stolen from you in the blink of an eye....and often even when you DON'T mess up that'll happen too, but it DEFINITELY WILL happen if you do mess up".

Perhaps I should beg forgiveness for my own rant. This whole thing just irritates the hell out of me.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Don't forget the my way or the highway even though I don't play D&E crowd lol.

From whom? Because I've felt on many occasions that people are straight-up telling me that the rules I use are inherently anti-rational. Or taking actively, knowingly, intentionally uncharitable interpretations in order to paint something else as obviously stupid and wrong and bad.

Smells pretty strongly of "my way or the highway" to me!

 

[TwoSix]

Don't forget the my way or the highway even though I don't play D&E crowd lol.

Life is a highway, I'm gonna ride it all night long.

 

[AlViking]

It is, however, when you consistently use strawmen and bad examples to prove your point. I don't even care if you don't actually understand it; it's when you deliberately misconstrue it that I have a problem.

What strawman have I used? The example I got was from a blog. I was not the one that came up with it, I never said it was a good example, my question was is it legitimate example. Would you allow the character to open the lock on a failure and add a cook that was only there because of their failure? If not, what is an alternative? For that matter, how often does fail forward apply?

But the response was either we got evasion or "that's a bad example" with no alternative. The answer people kept repeating was "The cook heard it <guard wandered by, cat freaked out, neighbor saw the attempt> on a failure" which I see no rules justification for and to me is saying that the cook was added because of the failure without clearly stating it. You have been the only one who gave answers (which I do appreciate) of broken lockpicks or cutting themselves and leaving blood. But it was not clear whether the lock was open or not. If it was not then these were just extra penalties and you're not failing forward, it's just failing with an extra cost.

We can either discuss platitudes and vague proclamations or we can discuss actual examples and details of how things work in a real game. Lately people simply insist "We already gave examples" but the only example I remember was from @hawkeyefan of rolling to see how long it takes to climb a cliff. Which is discussed in the DMG under Trying Again as "If failure has no consequences and a character can try and try again ... call for a single ability check and use the result to determine how long it takes for the character to complete the task." It's also similar to how I've described retries on picking a lock. They don't seem to fit the fail forward idea.