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

[Campbell]

I'm curious about Daggerheart's player principles. Can you give them here?

Here you go. One thing I think is helpful is to just treat the heading like the name of the thing. What it says underneath each heading is what really matters.

Be a fan of your character and their journey.

Find ways to show off what your character does best and what they do worst. Strive to make interesting choices and learn
more about who they are through play. Push your character’s story forward and let them grow with the fiction.

Spotlight Your Friends
Look for opportunities to put other characters in the spotlight. Provide them openings to do what they do best, ask them for
help and offer yours freely, and prompt them to share more of their thoughts and feelings.

Address the Players and Address Their Characters

Speak to the other characters within the world of the fiction. Lean on the connections you build together, ask them questions, and create a story using your conversations as well as your actions.

Speak to the other players outside of the fiction. Ask them what their character might do and what they want to see
happen in the narrative. As you play, be considerate of their preferences and desires.

Build The World Together
In Daggerheart, every participant is a storyteller, not just the GM. Daggerheart is a highly collaborative game and reaches its greatest potential when every player (including the GM) is working together. This means actively advocating for the story beats you want to see, offering suggestions to enrich the arcs of the other player characters, creating parts of the world with others at the table, and thinking deeply about your character’s motivations.

Play to Find Out What Happens
Everything you do at the table should flow from the fiction. Listen to your fellow players and the GM—then react to what their characters say and do to discover the story together as you build on each other’s creativity. If you roll the dice, let the results lead you through what happens next. Embrace complications with the same vigor with which you celebrate victories.

Hold on Gently
Improvisational storytelling isn’t always perfect, and that’s okay. Hold on gently to the fiction—enough that you don’t lose the pieces that matter, but not so tightly that the narrative has no room to breathe. Let yourself make mistakes and make changes. Smooth the edges and shape them to fit the story. Even if the story beats don't go the way you expect or a sudden twist catches you by surprise, trust that the GM and your fellow players will all create something beautiful and memorable by the end.

Following these principles will help guide you in telling exciting, unpredictable, and meaningful stories together at your table.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The way I read it, they seemed to want to take those few hours of play and concatenate them into a few minutes of player-side "Here's how we approach this" followed by a string of rolls; with the specific intent being to speed up play by skipping over all the granularity previous editions would have demanded.

In fairness, from what I gather SCs were much better defined and explained in one of 4e's later DMGs, but I only got the first one and stopped there.

Yeah I never got that. It's just a way of structuring a sequence of events that form a coherent unit of play into one 'game'. The purpose being to establish more objective success criteria. Instead of relying on some kind of GM 'feeling' about when a situation is ripe to be wrapped up, there's a rule for it.

I don't find they're any faster or slower than free play with similar numbers of checks. But the players have a much better idea of the 'weight' of a given action.

I would agree there's an art to framing SCs, particularly in low prep Narrativist play, but they're quite effective.

4e DMG1 has presentation issues, mainly the examples are BAD. They were clearly written without benefit of actual play, and the modules are mostly garbage in all respects, though later ones are better I guess.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes. Standards for players have always been front and center for Narrativist play. Stylistically it only works with players and GMs are in alignment.

• Monsterheart's Agenda section is addressed first to the players.
• Blades has a section on Player Best Practices.
• Daggerheart sets out a list of player principles.
• Sorcerer instructs the player to seek to resolve their kicker.
• Apocalypse World tells you to play your character with integrity.

The very first 2 pages of Dungeon World tell everyone exactly what the game is about. The first couple of sections make it pretty clear what the players are expected to be doing. Then the next couple of sections describe exactly what players' role is in the game, along with the GM's.

 

[AlViking]

I've been told more than once (albeit from the same poster) that this thread is an exception, where folks are supposed to complain about the attitudes and opinions of D&D players.

Because there's not enough people complaining and comparing D&D to other games and how (almost always) other games handle things better every time anything rules related comes up?

 

[DinoInDisguise]

By that definition, magical mind control of any stripe is out too.

As another poster pointed out, charming a PC into drinking alcohol, even if that PC is a strict teetotaler, is very different from using a social roll to convince them to do so over the player’s objection. In the former case, the out-of-character behavior is justified by the fiction of literal mind control. In the latter, it’s simply forced through mechanics when actual persuasion may have never been possible due to strongly held beliefs. You are altering the internal state of the PC in the latter, and not in the former. You are doing this because under actual mind control the PC's thoughts and convictions are no longer relevant, while under a simple social situation they very much are.

The core issue here is not that agency was removed for a few minutes. The issue is the changing of who the character is through the force of mechanics. Mind control does not do this, it momentarily makes the PC an extension of another character's internal state, instead of altering the PC's internal state. Social skills, like persuasion, just tell the player how their PC thinks and acts.

Do you feel that way about dice rolls/mechanics resulting in character death?

My issue is not with loss of control. My issue is about the type of control being lost, and how that loss is justified.
When a character dies due to mechanics, say, failing a saving throw or taking fatal damage, that’s a well-established consequence of physical risk. It’s supported by clear mechanics, player understanding, and narrative context. Death is a known possibility, and the player isn’t being told how their still-living character feels, thinks, or acts. They’re being told the story has ended.

In contrast, a social roll that tells a player, “Your character now believes X,” or “Now you act against your own convictions,” overrides the player’s portrayal of their character’s internal state. That’s much more intimate and subjective than a hit point total. If you do this without permission, you are infringing on the player's authorship of their PC through GM fiat. You are telling the player how their character interprets and reacts to stimuli. You are playing their character for them.

Mechanics that change the world or consequences, are fine; mechanics that replace or rewrite a PC’s internal state without clear justification, are not. Players expect the risk of death; they don’t expect the GM to dictate their thoughts.

 

[Enrahim]

Then why are we seeing these terms attempting to be applied to other games? I said above if they stay in their lane it's no problem. But they don't, and confusion results.

Now I start wondering how confusing it would be if we start using "roll for initiative" as a universal shorthand for starting combat..

So you are not rolling initiative in this new indie game? I am sorry, but I am not interested in games disallowing combat. What, now you are saying there is combat - but you just said it wasn't. Ok anyway, tell me how you roll for initiative then.

 

[Faolyn]

But you get that's a personal taste thing, right? I can probably say without too much loss of generality there's a lot of people out there who'd probably rather deal with a game with non-magical morale or fear checks than games with one shot death effects. A failed moral check says the game system and you don't entirely agree on how easy it is for people to panic in the situation (note my qualification there that there should be some nuance to that), but its not any worse than someone looking at the psych trait you took and reading it as stronger than intended/you assumed it'd be.

But again, you chose to take the psych trait. You don't choose to run away in the above instance, because the dice say you have to.

 

[AlViking]

As another poster pointed out, charming a PC into drinking alcohol, even if that PC is a strict teetotaler, is very different from using a social roll to convince them to do so over the player’s objection. In the former case, the out-of-character behavior is justified by the fiction of literal mind control. In the latter, it’s simply forced through mechanics when actual persuasion may have never been possible due to strongly held beliefs. You are altering the internal state of the PC in the latter, and not in the former. You are doing this because under actual mind control the PC's thoughts and convictions are no longer relevant, while under a simple social situation they very much are.

The core issue here is not that agency was removed for a few minutes. The issue is the changing of who the character is through the force of mechanics. Mind control does not do this, it momentarily makes the PC an extension of another character's internal state, instead of altering the PC's internal state. Social skills, like persuasion, just tell the player how their PC thinks and acts.



My issue is not with loss of control. My issue is about the type of control being lost, and how that loss is justified.
When a character dies due to mechanics, say, failing a saving throw or taking fatal damage, that’s a well-established consequence of physical risk. It’s supported by clear mechanics, player understanding, and narrative context. Death is a known possibility, and the player isn’t being told how their still-living character feels, thinks, or acts. They’re being told the story has ended.

In contrast, a social roll that tells a player, “Your character now believes X,” or “Now you act against your own convictions,” overrides the player’s portrayal of their character’s internal state. That’s much more intimate and subjective than a hit point total. If you do this without permission, you are infringing on the player's authorship of their PC through GM fiat. You are telling the player how their character interprets and reacts to stimuli. You are playing their character for them.

Mechanics that change the world or consequences, are fine; mechanics that replace or rewrite a PC’s internal state without clear justification, are not. Players expect the risk of death; they don’t expect the GM to dictate their thoughts.

I remember that .. discussion. How it escalated into "I will kill everyone you know if you don't take a drink!" was somehow supposed to be convincing. Really? You're so intent on me drinking that you'll commit cold blooded murder but I'm supposed to believe that this drink is just normal mundane alcohol? In a world with magic and curses?

To me there will also be times when you can't convince an NPC and I don't care if you can hit 30 on that persuasion check. There has to be a good reason for it and more than just "I don't want to deal with it" as a GM of course.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I read the portion in question. It deals entirely with making the game interesting for the players and gives advice on how to do that when the DM interacts with PCs. None of it is about making a boring PC life not boring.

Maybe read the whole book is my point. It adds context throughout. Maybe the rest of the text will help you recognize why your reading of that one section is off.

Then why are we seeing these terms attempting to be applied to other games? I said above if they stay in their lane it's no problem. But they don't, and confusion results.

Because that’s kind of the point of the thread. How could D&D do things differently.

How is this not clear at this point?

Because there's not enough people complaining and comparing D&D to other games and how (almost always) other games handle things better every time anything rules related comes up?

This is the only D&D thread I’m involved in. I don’t know if that’s true… a quick glance at some threads makes it seem like it’s not.

Now I start wondering how confusing it would be if we start using "roll for initiative" as a universal shorthand for starting combat..

So you are not rolling initiative in this new indie game? I am sorry, but I am not interested in games disallowing combat. What, now you are saying there is combat - but you just said it wasn't. Ok anyway, tell me how you roll for initiative then.

There might be some confusion because yeah, many games don’t have an initiative roll. But what will likely make it less confusing is the people who are playing games that don’t use initiative rolls at least know what they are… we know in what context the phrase “roll for initiative” means… and so we’d understand what’s meant.

 

[TwoSix]

That social skills used on a PC deprive the player of agency.

So?