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

[AlViking]

You keep bringing up one bad example (instead of all the good examples that can be found by googling it, which you claim to have done), and you're saying I'm sealioning?

Yeah, no.

(Also, sealioning is constantly harassing people for evidence... which is what you're doing by constantly demanding people defend the cook that they've already said is a poor example and provide you with more examples.)


No. Just when the PCs are there. The rest of the time, the entire house, for all practical purposes, ceases to exist. Unless you as the GM are actually keeping up-to-the-minute notes about it both before and after the PCs are done, of course.

If the PCs are only going to this house at 2AM and you're absolutely positive that the cook should be asleep at that time and not sleeping close enough to the kitchen door to hear, then they're asleep and won't hear the PCs should they fail. Then you pick a different consequence. I don't know how many times I have to say this.


Are you being particularly antagonistic, in the sense of doing things like putting out obstacles that are nearly impossible to beat, like they require a nat 20 or that the players memorize twenty different steps? No? Are you actually putting out obstacles that it's reasonable (not easy; reasonable) that the players can defeat? Then you're being neutral. Are you putting out obstacles that are both reasonable for the players to defeat and it will be really cool when it happens? Then you're being a fan of the players.


Sure, and this fails to address what you do if you're improvising--and in those cases, you've said you would, in fact, improvise. Which means that you may end up putting someone somewhere where you might not put them if you were thinking, or overthinking, about it during prep.


Which is exactly what fail forward is. Same concept, different names.


Incomplete information. Incomplete information plus a red herring.


As am I, and to get them I have read narrative games.

Y'know what? I'm done having this conversation. It started back up again because I was curious what fail forward would look like if there wasn't a cook and I shouldn't have bothered answering any of the other accusations or gotten back into the endless back and forth.

 

[Hussar]

Nitpic: FATE is definitely not an easy example. Rather the opposite. From Invoking & Compelling Aspects • Fate Core

I cannot off the bat give a good comment comment on your other examples. Too long since I read them. But I cannot remember either ironsworn nor 3:16 striking me as doing anything particularly untraditional in terms of character ownership and responsibilities.

Nothing you’ve quoted here contradicts anything I’ve said. It fully supports my point.

 

[Eric V]

I have been on both sides of the narrative vs simulationist debate that has underwrote the last several hundred pages of this thread. I am coming at this topic for a different point of view. I hold a deep reverence for my player's creative freedom of their character concepts, and very much respect their choices on their character's personality and inner state. So with that out of the way, I could not care less what is "realistic" here in this context.

In an RPG, at least those like D&D, the player has authorship over their character. If the player says, “My character wouldn’t do this,” then using a dice roll to override that is overriding authorship. It just so happens, it is also far from realistic, more on this later. The game isn’t real life. It's a shared narrative, and each participant owns part of it. The GM doesn’t own the PCs.

You can simulate persuasion through dialogue, roleplay, pressure, or consequences. But forcing a change in deeply held values or personality via a single roll doesn’t simulate human psychology. It shortcuts character development and undermines the collaborative nature of the game.

I promised more on the psychology later. Now is later. If we look into Robert Cialdini’s writing, He's a professor of psychology at Arizona state. He explains what the science is behind persuasion, as six principles in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Reciprocity, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. In the book he shows that people are influenced by subtle cues and motivations, not by simply winning an argument. This is why online discourse rarely changes minds on topics people care about. If it was just a weighted random number, you'd see much more changing of minds in online discourse.

Brain studies and neuroscience work to show that persuastion phsyically changes the brain activity, only when the messages align with other psychological triggers. Source below. The research is very clear in this aspect, persuasion is a process unlike a the roll of a dice.

The game is social at its very core, and if you're forcing players, through mechanics and DM fiat, to act in ways that contradict their character's will, without prior consent, then there's been a serious breakdown in the table’s social contract. If a player consents to having their character influenced by a persuasion roll, that’s perfectly fine. But I’ve yet to meet one who explicitly wants their character’s thoughts or decisions dictated to them without their input even under the false guise of realism.

So if you believe using persuasion rolls, as PC mind control, leads to good gameplay. You do you. But citing realism where none exists isn't compelling.


Source; Predicting Persuasion-Induced Behavior Change from the Brain - PMC

Edit: Forgot a source; Exploring physiologic reactions to persuasive information - PMC

Ok, so I (mostly) agree with pretty much everything you've written here*, especially these parts:
"The GM doesn’t own the PCs."
"It shortcuts character development and undermines the collaborative nature of the game."
"The game is social at its very core, and if you're forcing players, through mechanics and DM fiat, to act in ways that contradict their character's will, without prior consent, then there's been a serious breakdown in the table’s social contract."

It's just that I also think all of this also applies to PC death, pretty much point-for-point, and yet most of the DMs I have seen in this thread are fine with it (see my previous attempts to demonstrate this with the paladin who fails the climb check and dies, and is met with "sorry, them's the dice!"). After all "It's a shared narrative, and each participant owns part of it."

So, if my PC can't change her mind without my consent, it certainly doesn't seem right that she can die without it (her mind changes to...nothing). At least, according to the principles laid out above.

*What if it were several persuasion rolls? Over time? How many lights did Picard see?

 

[Eric V]

If I don't feel like having a drink, I won't and the more you push it the less likely I am to comply. I'm not discussing white room scenarios here, I'm talking about something that has happened in the real world. You could always come up with some hypothetical I suppose, you could intimidate me into having one, but persuade? No. People die for because they refuse to go against their beliefs on a regular basis.

A regular basis??!

Martyrs are known because they are exceptional, no?

As for the rest, people overestimate their willpower all the time...and then succumb.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't disagree.

The problem comes when you take one really-well-done mechanical element from this game, another from that game, a third from somewhere else, etc. etc. and then try to cobble them all together into something the least bit coherent and-or playable. I won't say it's impossible but it's close enough that I ain't about to try it.

In my experience it depends on what you're using as a systemic basis in the first place.

But of course my real answer is "Don't try to just cobble it together from the start. Pick one that's pretty close to how you think things should go, then tweak (even if that involves important a version of a mechanic from elsewhere)." Sometimes that's hard too, but there are, to be blunt, games I generally think have a better gestalt than D&D. The only advantage D&D and its offshoots have to me is a lot of people have gotten used to even the dumb parts.

And so instead, the dedicated kitbasher starts with a system that, while not perfect, works well enough to get by for most things and then augments it with good ideas form elsewhere provided those ideas can be made to vaguely fit in. The end result still isn't perfect and never will be, but it's good enough to be good enough and that's all that matters.

Sure. My own feeling is, however, there's "Is even there a basic structure here that seems like where I want to go?" Mighty little of that is true with D&D's structures. There are are some bits that are more acceptable than others, but mighty little is what I'd consider actually things I'd select by close.

(And again, not expecting D&D folks to agree here.)

 

[AlViking]

A regular basis??!

Martyrs are known because they are exceptional, no?

As for the rest, people overestimate their willpower all the time...and then succumb.

I was thinking worldwide. But I don't really care to nitpick. Sometimes an NPC can be persuaded, sometimes they can't.

 

[Eric V]

I was thinking worldwide. But I don't really care to nitpick. Sometimes an NPC can be persuaded, sometimes they can't.

Do you believe in different rules for NPCs and PCs?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There may be some games that are played that way, but D&D when I've seen social skills vs. PCs used hasn't been played that way.

I'm also not sure I'd want to play that way. The DM would have to ask the DM every time he wanted to use a social skill if it was okay to use, which would end up being a sizable disruption to game play. Better to just leave social skills vs. PCs off the table completely as intended by the game designers.

But I thought "ask the DM every time" was the correct and intended thing for D&D 5e? Like that was literally all people could talk about back when 5e launched. Every single thread asking for advice, without fail, had one of the first 10 (sometimes the first five) responses be some variation of "always ask your DM, we cannot answer this question, you just have to ask your DM every time".

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I do not think we should be reflecting the argument as an either or.
Item loss is a consequence that many simulationists adhere to.

I do though think a GM has to be careful how they navigate the fiction for the item loss. And I believe that is where you are coming from, in that we cannot be flippant about PC possessions, particularly items that are core to character.
At the same time, verisimilitude / setting reality is core for simulationists.

It 100% comes across as extremely flippant about player investment and preferences, yes, and treating the player's enjoyment of the game as secondary to the austere purity of the feeling of "verisimilitude". (Because, as I've personally brought up in this very thread, there are commonly-held beliefs which are objectively, factually inaccurate and strongly divergent from resembling truth, people just think that that's how things need to be.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If they don't play and don't want to play your games, what value do examples from those games give them?

Because I would be able to give actual, concrete examples I have personally played or run, rather than pure hypotheticals.

The dice in certain games, in conjunction with the rules, can provide fairly clear examples of how to interpret a fail forward situation, and how not to. Star Wars (Fantasy Flight) is one such game.

I don't understand this answer either. How is that not still under the GM's purview?

Sometimes, if exploring a world with setting logic as an important aspect is enjoyable to them. You can't have everything you like all the time, and you don't always get to choose which ones and for how long. I'm fine with that as a player, for my part.

Again, I just want to reiterate: You would rather trash the things a player loves about the game, dispassionately destroying something they care deeply about, solely to maintain utmost purity of feeling verisimilitude. I want to be completely sure that that's where you're coming from.

Because that is distinctly at odds with previous things discussed in the thread, and as stated above, comes across as a flippant disregard for the people at the table.