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

[Pedantic]

As a game mechanic, this is simple- it's a matter of narration and consequences. 15 and higher is a narration of success (DC15! Woot!). But you've also included a lower DC (10, in this case) - and if that DC is made, then there is a success, but there is a narration of consequences. What consequences? That's dependent on the established world. If the party is trying to be stealthy, maybe the opening of the lock succeeds, but it's noisy and attracts attention.

And so on. In other words, you aren't choosing to change the paradigm of the established world. You are providing a response that acknowledges the established world.


You can play around with this, but I've never seen any real issue with implementation for those who want to do it in D&D. IMO.

Right, this is why I've found the argument from gameplay more compelling. Consequences are unknowable to the player unless you include negotiation, and negotiation is generally unpleasant and bad gameplay (for the specific understanding of game-as-game). Plus, there are implications if you are maintaining an established world and you allow player input to consequences. If you present "someone hears you" as a possible complication and you open it up for negotiation there must be someone who can hear you present, even if "they hear you" is ruled out in negotiation in favor of "your lockpick breaks," or it would have been illegitimate to propose that as a consequence in the first place. Now the player has new information, and I shudder at the incentives the possibility of getting information that way creates.

The argument from simulation requires you to sign up for more things. I'm not hostile to "the GM's job is to create and maintain a fictional world running on their brain," but if you're not concerned about the gameplay implications, I'm not sure why it would matter precisely when they do any particular part of that. What's the harm in using the player's dice rolls in decision making, instead of any other arbitrary input? I think the case has to come down to immersion, and a particular kind thereof that's reliant on the GM's processes being entirely opaque. My sense is that some players need to believe the person of the GM with full knowledge of the world that's relating facts about the world to them is distinct from the entity that's populating that world in the first place.

A desire I support, because a player necessarily can't have any agency if those two were entirely conflated, but I don't understand if your concern is not in players being able to express agency and try to control the board state.

 

[AlViking]

Uh... not following you here.

Easy example using your lock.

The DC is 15.

15 and higher? Success.

9 and lower? Failure.

10-14? Fail forward (success with complication)

As a game mechanic, this is simple- it's a matter of narration and consequences. 15 and higher is a narration of success (DC15! Woot!). But you've also included a lower DC (10, in this case) - and if that DC is made, then there is a success, but there is a narration of consequences. What consequences? That's dependent on the established world. If the party is trying to be stealthy, maybe the opening of the lock succeeds, but it's noisy and attracts attention.

And so on. In other words, you aren't choosing to change the paradigm of the established world. You are providing a response that acknowledges the established world.


You can play around with this, but I've never seen any real issue with implementation for those who want to do it in D&D. IMO.

First, success with complication is is similar to fail forward but you can still simply fail. In some cases that makes sense to me. Knowledge checks are regularly handled something like that on a pretty regular basis. Try to break down a door and it works but you take a bit of damage. I do this sometimes if people are jumping further than they normally could. You're going to be able to jump far enough, but you may be barely holding on to the other side when you're done.

Second, that is creating house rules that change how checks are done. There's nothing wrong with that as long as people are clear that it's a house rule and how it works.

But the biggest issue for me is that the complications can be pretty limited. I'm generally not a fan of penalties not directly connected to the action. Partially fail a sleight of hand check to pick a lock and there are only so many options. Breakung the lockpicks would get old and after the first time it happens just be a minor wealth tax.

Other games have different processes, allowing other unconnected penalties. In those games failing a check resulting in getting attention from a guard makes sense because those games work on different assumptions of cause and effect. I think fail forward works better for those games because they don't assume a preestablished world or direct ties of immediate cause and effect.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

@Pedantic

I hear what you're saying, but IME and IMO, the desire to abstract many of these concepts to theory obscures what happens in practice.

I came across this recently-

https://bsky.app/profile/timclare.bsky.social%2Fpost%2F3lswl3tfdt22r

All games are cooperative. The very act of agreeing to & honouring rules, & the deeper compact, of temporarily engaging in the roleplay that the drama taking place on the table is important - this is a fundamentally cooperative enterprise.

I think it really speaks to the deeper issue- we often get caught up in theoretical constructs like divisions of authority and player agency, but it (the act of gaming - in this specific case, plaing D&D) is cooperative. Not just cooperative between the players, but cooperative between the players and the DM as well.

Or to put it another way, I have had no issue in practice with using fail forward (success with complications).

 

[Pedantic]

@Pedantic

I hear what you're saying, but IME and IMO, the desire to abstract many of these concepts to theory obscures what happens in practice.

I came across this recently-

https://bsky.app/profile/timclare.bsky.social%2Fpost%2F3lswl3tfdt22r

All games are cooperative. The very act of agreeing to & honouring rules, & the deeper compact, of temporarily engaging in the roleplay that the drama taking place on the table is important - this is a fundamentally cooperative enterprise.

I think it really speaks to the deeper issue- we often get caught up in theoretical constructs like divisions of authority and player agency, but it (the act of gaming - in this specific case, plaing D&D) is cooperative. Not just cooperative between the players, but cooperative between the players and the DM as well.

Or to put it another way, I have had no issue in practice with using fail forward (success with complications).

I love that anecdote, and it aligns neatly with my understanding of competition as a means instead of an end. I don't take the same conclusion though; that the activity is fundamentally a cooperative group effort doesn't mean we can flatten down what the activity is. I love to play games with my friends; I would enjoy my time less if we did something else. There's value in the hashing out and nailing down.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I love that anecdote, and it aligns neatly with my understanding of competition as a means instead of an end. I don't take the same conclusion though; that the activity is fundamentally a cooperative group effort doesn't mean we can flatten down what the activity is. I love to play games with my friends; I would enjoy my time less if we did something else. There's value in the hashing out and nailing down.

I agree that there is some value. For example, I think that there is a lot of value to be gained in exploring how various systems can impact the feel of a game, and we often don't pay enough attention to that. Let's make that more concrete-

Why do most players take average hit points when they level up, but always want to roll damage? In fact, if you're playing D&D, how would you feel if all damage you did was always the average amount?

Take another easy example- what is the difference between rolling under and rolling over? Is there anything inherently preferable in D&D to using a "roll over a target number" in combat? Is the reason it is better to use that because of familiarity, or because there is a psychological association with rolling over?

And so on. I could continue. When I post my annual Pride posts (discontinued for this year because ... waves arms in the air at everything going on), I talk about the nature of different mechanics, and how they can be inclusive of queer romance or they can be queering.

....but I have found that most conversations here aren't very productive, as they tend to circle back to the same topics that aren't particularly productive for me. Because they aren't really about game theory, but usually about ... other things.

 

[Pedantic]

I agree that there is some value. For example, I think that there is a lot of value to be gained in exploring how various systems can impact the feel of a game, and we often don't pay enough attention to that. Let's make that more concrete-

Why do most players take average hit points when they level up, but always want to roll damage? In fact, if you're playing D&D, how would you feel if all damage you did was always the average amount?

Take another easy example- what is the difference between rolling under and rolling over? Is there anything inherently preferable in D&D to using a "roll over a target number" in combat? Is the reason it is better to use that because of familiarity, or because there is a psychological association with rolling over?

And so on. I could continue. When I post my annual Pride posts (discontinued for this year because ... waves arms in the air at everything going on), I talk about the nature of different mechanics, and how they can be inclusive of queer romance or they can be queering.

....but I have found that most conversations here aren't very productive, as they tend to circle back to the same topics that aren't particularly productive for me. Because they aren't really about game theory, but usually about ... other things.

Yeah, I empathize with that. My take is that all this churn mostly comes down to struggling with the underlying nature of what we're doing. Not to give the creative agenda thing too much credence, but I think there's more than one fundamental activity living under the same name in RPGs, and those things produce different design goals. Then criticism often seems to come in asking why a product produced to serve one purpose fails to serve another, and that becomes a proxy fight to try and argue that one of activities living under the RPG title is really the true whole of the enterprise.

You're right though. I'm nostalgic for a time we had more commonplace about what the thing was, because it meant the design discussions could much more easily be about implementation than goals.

 

[Enrahim]

Yeah, I empathize with that. My take is that all this churn mostly comes down to struggling with the underlying nature of what we're doing. Not to give the creative agenda thing too much credence, but I think there's more than one fundamental activity living under the same name in RPGs, and those things produce different design goals. Then criticism often seems to come in asking why a product produced to serve one purpose fails to serve another, and that becomes a proxy fight to try and argue that one of activities living under the RPG title is really the true whole of the enterprise.

You're right though. I'm nostalgic for a time we had more commonplace about what the thing was, because it meant the design discussions could much more easily be about implementation than goals.

I sort of agree. Just want to point out that a lot of grief has been over thinking there might more than one distinct activities underlying RPGs. While two groups might be playing things that look completely different, there are likely lots of groups playing something that is clearly very varying blends of what those two extreme groups did.

Even dimensionality attempts tend to be frustrated, as most groups seem to be close to the "middle" no matter what sort of dimension you try to detect, making them of limited use for identifying anything but the outliers.

RPGs is an amazingly rich hobby. I think this is what make it feel like it should be possible to find some structure, some grouping of "fundamental activities" hiding in all the mud. I have yet to see a convincing suggestion for such though, that hasn't been discredited in some way.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't think it fits very well into classic, Gygaxian dungeon-crawling, D&D.

I think it really depends on the DM. Some dungeon crawls have factions of creatures in them to interact with, so social failures could be assigned interesting consequences. Exploration failures could also have them pretty easily in a dungeon crawl.

You can fail at the task(your play wasn't skilled enough), but still have the result be interesting. It's a little tougher than modern D&D for sure, but I think it could work out well.

And I don't think it fits at all into Rolemaster, where the consequences of failure tend to be prescribed fairly tightly by the rules and tables that govern a particular action resolution, and don't encompass "fail forward".

Why can't you have that tightly prescribed consequence AND something that moves the story forward in some manner?

 

[Pedantic]

I sort of agree. Just want to point out that a lot of grief has been over thinking there might more than one distinct activities underlying RPGs. While two groups might be playing things that look completely different, there are likely lots of groups playing something that is clearly very varying blends of what those two extreme groups did.

I actually think the problem is the inverse; two groups may be appearing to do something very similar (especially when you judge the end-product report of play) when they have actually done quite different things.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Yeah, I empathize with that. My take is that all this churn mostly comes down to struggling with the underlying nature of what we're doing. Not to give the creative agenda thing too much credence, but I think there's more than one fundamental activity living under the same name in RPGs, and those things produce different design goals. Then criticism often seems to come in asking why a product produced to serve one purpose fails to serve another, and that becomes a proxy fight to try and argue that one of activities living under the RPG title is really the true whole of the enterprise.

You're right though. I'm nostalgic for a time we had more commonplace about what the thing was, because it meant the design discussions could much more easily be about implementation than goals.

Kinda, yeah. But I've written about the problems and nature of second-order design before, as well as the issues and differences with heuristics (norms etc.) and rules, and I think that a lot of the conversations ignore what happens in practice because it's hard to talk about second-order design, negative space, and the heuristics used.

Which is fancy-speak for ignoring the ways that we are blind to the ways that games are actually played, by actual people, with varying levels of experience, practice, knowledge, and expectations. I did a deep dive on WOTC's first TTRPG once (called Everway) and why it was a glorious failure- the short version is that it worked amazing when it was played internally at WOTC, Jonathan Tweet and John Tynes ran the games. And they were amazing GMs! The freeform, diceless system worked perfectly when you had these DMs, and a group of engaged gamers!

But in the real world? Not so much. Does that mean that Everway is a bad game? Not at all- it was an amazing game, but only for a certain small group of people.

I used to link to a Mitchell & Webb Show skit- here it is...

Spoiler: Some NSFW Language

The basic point is that something that seems simple to one person is impossible to another. Give you another example- some of the great and wonderful games (the PbTA games and the BiTD games) are viewed by some people as constraining actions through "principles" and so on, but that's only because they have internalized that process and they can do it. For others, it might as well be magic- a standard 3e player might think it is basically slightly bounded ad hoc storytelling. Meanwhile the PbTA and BiTD players look at the rules lite brigade and think that what they are doing is madness, because they don't have the same background in the heuristics and expectations for those games. And so on.

Basically, the application of ideas works best when you're using it within a specific area, and not to compare. If you know what I mean.