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

[pemerton]

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.

I was watching a show recently where A had put a drug into B's drink, as part of a conspiracy with C and D. But B then didn't want to drink. So C proposed a toast, and raised his glass. And then everyone, including B, followed along - and so B drank some of the drink, and thus succumbed to the drug.

Part of the skill of magicians, charlatans, etc is to motivate people to do things they didn't think they were going to do, and otherwise wouldn't have done.

 

[pemerton]

Who's antagonistic? You mean the people who repeatedly state that while it doesn't work for them, if it works for you have fun?

Perhaps the people who keep asserting that inadvertently startling a cook is "completely unrelated" to a failed attempt at burglary:

I get that in some narrative games, complications completely unrelated to the task can happen

 

[pemerton]

"Oh, you failed your arcana check to identify the runes? They're definitely runes of demon summoning, and you've triggered them!"

Were they runes of demon summoning before the roll to interpret them, or after?

I thought it was clear, from @TwoSix's post, that the runes were runes of demon summoning.

The PC discovered as much by trying to read them.

The prompt at the table for the GM to (i) decide on that bad news, and (ii) announce it to the player, was the failed roll.

This seems like a counterpart to my runes example upthread, where the player fails the roll rather than succeeds, and so the PC's discovery of what the runes say/do is bad news rather than good news.

It reminds me of this, from my own Burning Wheel play:

The rogue wizard, Jobe, had a relationship with his brother and rival. The ranger-assassin, Halika, had a relationship, also hostile with her mentor, and the player decided that was because it turned out she was being prepared by him to be sacrificed to a demon. It seemed to make sense that the two rival, evil mages should be one and the same, and each player wrote a belief around defeating him: in Jobe's case, preventing his transformation into a Balrog; in Halika's case, to gain revenge. . . .

I had pulled out my old Greyhawk material and told them they were starting in the town of Hardby, half-way between the forest (where the assassin had fled from) and the desert hills (where Jobe had been travelling), and so each came up with a belief around that: I'm not leaving Hardby without gaining some magical item to use against my brother and, for the assassin with starting Resources 0, I'm not leaving Hardby penniless.

I started things in the Hardby market: Jobe was looking at the wares of a peddler of trinkets and souvenirs, to see if there was anything there that might be magical or useful for enchanting for the anticipated confrontation with his brother. Given that the brother is possessed by a demon, he was looking for something angelic. The peddler pointed out an angel feather that he had for sale, brought to him from the Bright Desert. Jobe (who has, as another instinct, to always use Second Sight), used Aura Reading to study the feather for magical traits. The roll was a failure, and so he noticed that it was Resistant to Fire (potentially useful in confronting a Balrog) but also cursed. (Ancient History was involved somehow here too, maybe as a FoRK into Aura Reading (? I can't really remember), establishing something about an ancient battle between angels and demons in the desert.)​

I think this is a fairly straightforward technique.

 

[pemerton]

Verisimilitude. Sometimes bad things, things we don't want, happen anyway. If you're exploring a world that operates in many ways similar to our reality, the universe doesn't provide special protection to personal talismans.

Obviously the universe doesn't.

But some people go through life without losing their precious stuff, so it's not as if it would be unrealistic for that to happen in the case of the PC.

The issue is decision-making process, not whether or not the fiction is verisimilitudinous.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

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.

I agree.

If you look at the post I was replying to, it cited realism as justification for forced persuasion of a PC. I was just dispelling realism as a defense of what I consider a bad practice. And showing why it wasn't realistic for someone to all of a sudden change their mind about deeply held belief in a single conversation. The entire game is an abstraction, I dont think "but it happens in real life" is a good argument for trampling on the intent and wishes of our players.

Spoiler: Side rant, no need to read if you dont want.

Honestly, I feel like I’m in no-man’s land in this discussion. I don’t fully subscribe to either of the dominant sides in the ongoing debate. I’m not here flying the flag for “realism,” nor am I a strict narrativist. I, recently, let a player piledrive a witch off a dragon from 300 feet and didn’t turn them into pudding. I did this only because it was really cool.

And then people argue with me about "well the rules say," and it's really odd because I don't feel rules are anything but a framework. I just want to help my players tell cool stories about the cool characters they came up with. And I want to do it in a way that enables their imaginations to go wild, and to embrace their inner child by leaving the stress of the day behind.

So when people come at me with intense arguments about realism, or narrativism, or about respecting the mechanics, I’m just kind of sitting there thinking, “I don’t really care about any of that. I just want to protect character intent.” I like Daggerheart’s death rules. I like fail forward. I also think it’s weird when everything has to cause a dramatic downstream effect just because “it’s more interesting.” And if you throw out structure entirely for the sake of story, things get messy fast.

All I was doing here was pointing out that overriding a PC’s core belief with a persuasion check feels like poor form to me. And somehow, I feel like I’m the enemy of both sides. So I just want anyone silly enough to read this to know, I come in peace. I really am only arguing about player intent.

 

[Faolyn]

Not a fan. Talk to your players and/or GM before you play, or work out disagreement as it occurs at the table. 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.

Every game is full of rules that bind how the GM acts. The game tells you how to run an encounter, how to give out treasure, how to set up challenges, all to show what is and what isn't fair. You're just used to it so it's become invisible to you.

 

[Eric V]

Death is a structural necessity. Forced persuasion is not.

Continuing with D&D, the threat of death is what holds the game together.

I can't imagine why you are saying this, but I can't believe this is true. Shared narrative? Fun amongst friends? Sure. Threat of death? No, I don't think so.

Threat of loss should be present, but as I mentioned much earlier in the thread, death is not the only form of loss, or even the most interesting.

13th Age has an informal rule that PCs can only be killed by named villains. Sentinel Comics RPG heroes can't die at all without player permission. Both games hold together fine, and there's no reason to think D&D should be different. In fact, with all the complaints about D&D2024 being so heavily favored towards the PCs, maybe it's already true for D&D?

 

[Faolyn]

But as you said yourself, the psych trait may well just be modifying a roll you have to make in the situation anyway (I know its that way in Savage Worlds for fear checks).

Sure. There are fear checks--which are pretty much limited to effects caused by creatures and magic, at least in fantasy games--but that has nothing to do with anything because they're not morale rules that force PCs to stop a battle because they rolled badly.

 

[Faolyn]

Well, House MD isn't Sherlock. By being a different character, even if he is inspired by the (crappy) interpretations of Sherlock Holmes, it's quite a bit easier to swallow that he would behave as he does. House is a semi-pro cynic with various emotional traumas and severe physical pain pretty much 24/7, and the show delves into how and why he became such a bitter, jaded, angry person.

Part of the problem with the all-too-common bad interpretation of Sherlock Holmes is that it conflates how he behaves with specific people into being the way he behaves toward everyone. Holmes cares deeply about Watson, for example, and even though Watson himself explicitly says that this feeling isn't commonly shown, it's still there, and that he feels very honored in the moments when Holmes shows that depth of feeling. (There's a particular mystery where they're busting a counterfeiter, and a fight breaks out in a pitch-black room. Holmes thinks Watson has been grievously injured, and goes absolutely HAM on the criminal, which prompts Watson to explicitly make that observation.) Likewise, Holmes tends to be both respectful and compassionate to the ordinary people, especially women and children, that he encounters; it's wealthy, powerful, and/or influential people, usually men, to whom he acts so cold and dispassionate. E.g. contrast his behavior toward the unnamed European noble in A Scandal in Bohemia vs how he listens to, and supports, the woman who comes to him frightened by her nebulous experiences in The Adventure of the Speckled Band, or the similarly confused and unnerved young woman in The Adventure of the Dancing Men.

Dr. House is a jerk to everyone because he's bitter, lonely, in chronic severe pain, and struggling with emotional trauma and cognitive dissonance. Mr. Holmes is a jerk to powerful people who want him to wish their problems away, but not to the downtrodden, overlooked, or disenfranchised, even when he gets nothing more than the satisfaction of an interesting case either way. I'm reminded specifically of how impertinent, and indeed even overtly rude, Holmes behaves in The Adventure of the Priory School, where a powerful and wealthy nobleman basically wants Holmes to smooth over the criminal acts committed by the noble's bastard son--and unlike the vast majority of his cases, he is quite keen to collect the substantial sum offered in payment for his services.

Apparently the Conan-Doyle estate holds (or held until very recently) the rights to the "nicer" or at least more emotional Sherlock and thus other people could only use the cynical version.

Why Sherlock Holmes Can Finally Smile - IGN

The estate of Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had claimed ownership over any version in which he’s... nice. But now, he’s free to smile again -- and fully in the public domain.

www.ign.com

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That isn't a simple question. Let me try an allegory; would you houserule a board game in the middle of play if a player wasn't enjoying the experience?

Generally speaking, I would answer no. I might not play that game again with them or at all, I might be open to a proposed change after enough plays that I really felt like I understood the design intent if I find some other merit there, and in some cases I'd be open to stopping play altogether (though not all, I routinely play games with player elimination or losing board states that expect all players to continue until the end point). Experiencing the game as-is is the point of the activity, and everyone came to do that; everyone there has chosen to risk their having a bad time to have this specific time.

House-ruling a board game (other than Monopoly, which is chronically house-ruled in unproductive ways) is pretty rare. Further, a board game is--perhaps--a few hours' entertainment or lack thereof. It's trivial to not play it again with that person.

If you're the GM of a D&D game, you're usually gonna be in it for the long haul. That's an enormous disanalogy, because having a sucky time with one board game is almost always a single night's problem--often much less, as you can just stop playing that game and immediately switch to playing some other game. Not so with a TTRPG; they're long-haul games in most cases. Or at least that's what I would expect for most of the games run by folks in this thread.

You're trying to set up a hierarchy of things that are important to play, and arguing the player's attachment to this character item or beat is necessarily more important than whatever consistency might put it at stake, and that just isn't a universal value.

It was a declared value in something Micah had explicitly described as his "platonic ideal" of simulation:

This is my Platonic Ideal of play (by which I mean, what I strive for as a DM but will never truly reach).

This in response to @clearstream posting a link to Sam Sorensen's "New Simulationism" manifesto, which explicitly says as its final point:

10. Players come before the fictional world.​

In all senses, the people you play with are more important than the game. Your play community is the foundation of play. Nothing matters more.​

It's hard to understand how these stances square up with one another. We are now seeing that, no, there are things that matter more, like maintaining the purest feeling of verisimilitude. That's a pretty damn big change.

And no, I don't agree that I am setting a hierarchy of play. I am asking why, given what Micah has said about something that does define a hierarchy of play where "nothing matters more" than the people at the table, he is now saying that the hierarchy of play does not say that "nothing matters more" than the people at the table.

Further, I'll note that I specifically set out a case that would be perfectly cromulent: the player willingly electing to put the thing they're invested in into danger, risking that element. If they've knowingly done that, all bets are off. They have given their consent to its possible destruction. This is for things where they have not done that.

Ideally everyone signing up a game in the first place shares the same set of values and is willing to make some sacrifices to achieve whatever verisimilitude is at stake if that's necessary. I really don't see a problem with setting that request outside of negotiation; that feels much like how I don't really like hidden movement games and generally opt not to play them, and if I do decide to play one, I don't feel entitled to complain about the structure.

There's no moral imperative to compromise here, if both parties aren't interested. We could just do something else.

The problem is that this is happening after the game has started. The player has already been invested. It's already clear what things about the character make them happy, make them interested in playing. You're correct that the ideal is that everyone knows exactly what everyone else wants and expects in advance, and all of those things are completely in alignment, and none of them change along the way. I find that in the vast majority of cases, that ideal is not met, and thus different people have different ideas of what is or isn't reasonable in a given context, disagree about what the group can/should (try to) achieve, and what is or isn't "fair game". The closer something gets to being the foundation of a particular player's investment or connection, the more extreme a risk it is to just destroy that thing dispassionately.