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

[zakael19]

Maybe! Maybe for you. I don't even buy green bananas anymore.

Gotta do the Korean way: a wrapped pack of bananas in different stages of ripeness so that each day you get a perfectly ready one!

 

[zakael19]

Short-and-sweet name for a useful thing to do when figuring out what a group wants from a game (e.g., something to deploy during Session Zero).

"Lines" are things that, if crossed, would break the experience. "Veils" are things that are okay to occur, but not much "on camera", so to speak--hidden behind a veil of fade-to-black/nondescript summary. More or less, the antithesis of "must-have" and "big plus"--a "must-NOT-have" and "keep it soft touch".

Lines and veils can be anything, whether in-world or game-rules or whatever.

If a group has incompatible interests, e.g. one has a line against (say) killing innocents and another player (or the GM) is specifically there to play through seeing/doing genuine, unrepentant evil, spelling this out saves everyone time. It helps nip bad group comps in the bud. For groups that have compatible interests, it helps avoid unintentional harm; if you know that sex scenes or high-detail bartering are veils for player A and B respectively, then A knows not to get hyper-invested into detailed shopkeeper interactions and B knows that adult events are okay but nitty-gritty details are not.

The point is to promote communication and avoid causing unintentional harm.

Wasn’t there an entire thread or side tangent of a thread about 2024 DMG complaining about the idea of communication tools being presented in the book?

 

[pemerton]

It doesn't seem to me to be just about how different games approach play. It seems IMO to be at least as much about coming up with cute, pithy names for those principles that people can repeat and associate with your product, even if those names don't seem to fit the principle for which they are a label. It is in fact marketing to some extent, at the expense of clarity.

In what way are the rules for Apocalypse World unclear?

 

[pemerton]

What's useful or evocative about a phrase that has nothing to do with the actual principle discussed?

If you read the Apocalypse World rules, you'll see that "Make the players' character's lives not boring" and "Be a fan of the players' characters" are key principles in the game, and that those phrases are summations of the more extended advice that sits under them.

 

[pemerton]

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

This is like saying, if all I write is fantasy, then why would I read examples of non-fantasy fiction?

It seems obvious to me that examples from games that I'm not playing, and from approaches that I'm not using, can be helpful and interesting for me.

 

[pemerton]

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.

Hmm . . . this reminds me of several posts upthread asserting that in my MHRP-derived Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy game, the PC caused the "quantum" runes to say one thing rather than another.

 

[pemerton]

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.

You choose to play the RPG that includes that rule.

 

[Umbran]

Creating binding rules that force the GM to behave in a certain way or make decision based on restrictive principles is not the way I want to play.

If you choose to run a specific style of game, and refuse to alter it "because it isn't that kind of game", you are being bound by a restrictive principle.

 

[pemerton]

The problem is when the discussion involve terms that seemingly cannot have a well defined meaning outside the scope of a given system. Like it seem like someone suggested D&D could use "fail forward", but when drilling into that suggestion it turned out "fail forward" is not defined in a way that made the suggestion even inteligable.

Of course the suggestion is intelligible. @hawkeyefan gave an example from actual play of 5e D&D. I've given examples from actual play of 4e D&D. There has been discussion of a blog example (about sneaking into a house and inadvertently alerting a cook) that the blog author clearly thinks can work in contemporary fairly mainstream D&D play.

That some people don't want to do something doesn't mean that the suggestion to do it is unintelligible.

There do seem to be multiple definitions. If a character fails to pick a lock and the GM says "You can try bashing it down or you saw a window you could go through" is that fail forward? Heck if I know any more.

Why does it matter? The reason for drawing someone's attention to "fail forward" as a technique is not to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for counting as an example of "fail forward" - it's to enhance their repertoire of techniques for narrating consequences.

 

[pemerton]

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.

So is fighting. So is climbing. So is being an impressive and charismatic performer. None of these are processes that are much like the roll of a die.

RPGing resolution is mostly about generating a decision as to what happens next in the shared fiction, not about recreating or modelling the causal process that led to this thing happening as a result of this other thing.