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

[EzekielRaiden]

And like I just said, I'm sure that's how you are seeing it. I don't. Why do you assume that the player doesn't value that verisimilitude as well? Is it because that's how you'd feel about it? If so, then please just state your personal, subjective opinion plainly.

I didn't say they don't. You had responded to something talking about not casually destroying the things that make a player care about their character, by straight-up saying nope, doesn't matter, I can and will destroy the stuff that makes you care about playing your character.

Whether or not the player also cares about verisimilitude, destroying that means taking away the anchor keeping them in the game. That's the whole reason that the thing you responded to exists. It's there saying, "Respect the things that make players care about staying in your game."

Verisimilitude is important. It is not as important as ensuring that your players actually do want to keep playing the game. Verisimilitude almost surely will be part of what keeps your players in your game. But if I were a betting man (and I am not), I would bet that all the verisimilitude in the world couldn't get your players on board with a campaign setting or character premise that they just had no interest in playing. The verisimilitude is the second layer of the pyramid of their hierarchy of needs; without content premises (character concepts, setting conceits, style and tone, etc.) that interest them, even literally infinite verisimilitude wouldn't be enough to keep them at the table, other than perhaps out of a temporary burning curiosity at how such a feat were possible.

 

[Faolyn]

Well no. They don’t tell you anything because DnD is in no ways a sim game.

And longsword isn’t vex. Vex grants you advantage. Long words grant disadvantage to the opponent’s next attack but I forget what that’s called. But in any case, it’s a non-magical effect that has narrative implications.

Sort of. In that yes, because 5e is doesn't require targets to act in specific ways and yes, there's the implication that something has happened because it's called "Vex" and not "Cause Disadvantage On Target's Next Attack", but no, it's not mind control and it doesn't force the PC or NPC to act in any particular way or even narrate in any particular way.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Those situations are not the same as social play where a single couple minute conversation can have several rolls. Stopping play to ask each participant about each roll would be a large disruption to the game.

But it isn't a large disruption in combat...? Where rolls are much more frequent and often occur rapid-fire?

C'mon Max. This is blatant special pleading.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

"Cavalierly destroy"? Your precious item has the same chance of being destroyed as anything else you're carrying, mitigated by any protective measures you've taken to help ensure its safety.

It happens all the time: characters lose items that are mechanically vital to their ability to do most anything. A Cleric can't cast without a holy symbol, usually worn around the neck. A mage can't study without a spellbook, usually carried in a backpack*. A warrior's survivability (and thus, usefulness) declines sharply when his fancy magic plate armour lies unrepairably scattered around his feet.

That you start complaining when someone (was it Micah? I forget now) merely suggests you get a fireproof box to put your not-mechanically-essential item in really isn't a good look; I'll leave it at that.

Also, did it occur to you that the players might very well be enjoying the experience because of the underlying verisimilitude and believability that permeates the whole campaign?

* - due to their uncanny ability over the decades to succeed on saving throws we have declared backpacks to be the master race, and determined that after the nuclear holocaust they will become the planet's dominant lifeform.

I did not "start complaining" when the fireproof box was brought up.

That was brought up as a dismissal of my criticism.

Beyond that, I have nothing further to say to this, because you're straight-up divorcing the conversation from the context in which it occurred in order to--as I have been repeatedly accused of in this thread--"score points".

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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?

I believe so, yes. And it was just as tedious as one might expect.

 

[Faolyn]

This treads close to suggesting that either a) narrative games never have players who try to game the system or b) that only good players play narrative games.

While I'm sure there are narrative systems it's possible to game--it's probably quite possible in Daggerheart, since I'm sure some abilities are going to be stronger or weaker than others, although I haven't really explored that--I have a hard time seeing how you can even do that in, say, a PbtA game. There's minimal or no character balance, at least not in the ones I've read, because of the way playbooks are set up, which is mostly around theme, not abilities, and it's strongly encouraged that you pick your moves based on what's logical for your character, not what's the most powerful. And there's often a downside built-in. Like in Monster of the Week, where it's possible to play a seriously heavy hitter/tank if you take the Monstrous (there's one in my game), but you also have a curse. And the Keeper will use that curse, because it's important to your character.

Also, from my experience, there are generally far fewer hard rules to exploit. Most of the PbtA games I've read basically say "Is it logical your character can do this thing? Then you can do this thing." Like, in the Masks game I'm in, my character has stretching powers. How much can she stretch? As much as the situation demands. I may need to make a roll +Freak to really exploit her powers, but even on a failure I can do something.

 

[Thomas Shey]

TSR-era D&D is a better starting point IMO due to its discrete-subsystem design.

Whereas that's the exact opposite of what I want to have to work with; a coherent system tells you a lot about proper ways to do new things baked into it. Ad-hoc systems are just asking for unforseen consequences.

 

[Pedantic]

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.

What's your cut-off? I've played 3 days of 1812 with a player elimination at the start of day 2, and a doomed position for at least 1 player before the start of day 3. We're trying to play again, now that we've got a better handle on the short-selling mechanics, but it's obviously a tricky one to schedule. The possibility of such an outcome was clear at the beginning, and frankly that possibility was a significant factor in why we wanted to play it in the first place.

I don't think length of game gives anyone an extra special claim here, except perhaps that no one can reasonable be upset if a player resigns in a game of indeterminate length, and the unbounded nature of play necessarily means the game can be completed at basically any point.

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

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.

I don't really care that you found an absolute in an article linked by a different party that whoever you're arguing with generally affirmed, and have decided to make it a synecdoche for the whole position. That's barely a rhetorical leg to stand on.

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.

Except, if the game makes no special provision for them to do so, they have. That, and I think your point is still ill-formed; those same players are already signing up to play this game, the structure and tenor of the experience was determined before we reached this point. To change the structure of it mid-play is to necessarily deprive all of them of the experience they all sought to begin with, including the player who now wants it changed. They've perhaps learned something about what they like or don't like in games, but that doesn't absolve them of their structural agreements when they decided to play this particular one. I don't see how this is much different than asking to play a different board game on turn 3 of the first one you signed up to play.

You're presumably calling for a design principle, "games should be constituted this way" on the basis that this experience is necessarily undesirable, and no one would submit to have it. That's the hierarchy I'm taking about; the sort of character investment you're discussing must be more valuable than a naturalistic experience, and should they come into tension, the latter should give way as a design norm.

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.

That argument surely works equally well in reverse. Presumably there are something like 4 other players at the table, who may just as reasonably be basing their "investment" on this naturalism we're taking about. Why does our first player have any more claim? Surely they have less, if the nature of gameplay was clear upfront, simply be being outnumbered and being in the position of expecting the structure to be altered on their behalf.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Tough. I'll deal with that argument as and when I have to.

Fine for you, but I absolutely know people who'd see it that way if the consequences were at all significant.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Uhm, they absolutely can do that if you roll badly in SW. And there's no hard line between "creatures" and high end violence.