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

[Emerikol]

Some people don't want the risk of PC death to even be a possibility. It's too negative for those folks. That's how I am with non-magical compulsion taking away my agency. Yes it's a negative, but that doesn't mean it has to be a bad thing for you or those games that use it as a process of play.

I agree with you but for me it's more a matter of me being allowed to play my character. When a skill roll forces me to fall in love with someone, I don't feel like I really have agency over my character. It's nothing to do with negatives. I'm all for negatives in their proper context.

 

[TwoSix]

I would argue if it doesn't happen it's not really roleplaying. What do you think playing a role is? In combat, my players will narrate their combat actions and then roll. I believe in many cases it would be better if the players just roleplayed and the DM rolled the rolls for reactions due to skills behind the screen.

That would be the conservative argument, yes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

We might debate sizes of groups etc.. but I think it would be nonproductive. Let's just say there are diverse playstyles out there.

I mean, given what we actually do see in 5e, I don't think there really is any room for debate, but I'm willing to leave it at "we agree to disagree".

This is another of our debates. Sadly, I don't think players on average are as likely to be working in good faith unless it's a well tried group of friends. Also the group is typically anywhere from 5 to 6 players (I've had 9 before -- too many). But again this doesn't really reflect much on our main discussion.

Okay but if you get to presume bad-faith behavior on the part of the players, why should I have to labor under the notion that GMs only and exclusively engage in good-faith behavior? This is just part and parcel of the inherently biased double standard that I detest so much. GMs are presumed to be angels unless they've been proven to be devils, and players the exact opposite. It's infuriating; we presume blamelessness from the people who have the greatest potential for abusing their power, and we presume blame from the people who have the least ability to actually respond to abuse beyond dropping the nuclear option and ending the game entirely. Why? Why is that okay?

Your last example (see below) is a bit strained but the book one is a good one. Maybe if the player is new I find a way for the book to have survived. I then tell the player it was a one in a million long shot that the book survived and he should consider that going forward. If he keeps carrying the book on adventures, then he might lose it if the rolls are bad.

I just don't understand what is gained from this. It's a family heirloom poetry book. It doesn't have any mechanical value. Its presence doesn't harm anyone. Its destruction by flame (again, assuming the player is taking reasonable precautions) adds only the teeniest, tiniest bit of extra verisimilitude, at the price of destroying something anchoring the player to that character, something that if lost might genuinely remove their reason to keep playing in the game. Why is that a good thing? Why is it so gorram important to emphasize flammability by having this book be put at risk day in and day out simply because the character carries it to write in while they're resting?

I don't think that would be acceptable nor would I consider it rules as written. I wouldn't play a game where a rust monster could take all magic away from a sorcerer. So I'd houserule it away if it was there. I would though allow for level drains or character death because that is up front a part of the game. I tell my group I play the monsters to the intelligence and ability that they would have in the world. That doesn't always mean to the best of my ability. In fact it rarely means that.

Okay, but now you're saying there are things that can be so essential to playing the character, that could be taken away (after all, the GM is the final and ultimate authority, yes? The rules should never impinge on that authority, yes?), and if they did, it might actually be worse than just killing the character off outright. The example illustrates my point: there IS a line that a GM could cross, where if they did this thing, it would ruin your investment in the character, even if the thing they did was specifically done to enhance the verisimilitude of the experience. Consider, then, that there might be characters who feel similarly about that heirloom book of poetry and illustrations.

Whether you consider the example far-fetched or not is, for me, not relevant. You now grok the feeling that the poetry-book-player would have. They would feel the same way you do, where it would genuinely be the kind of thing that might drive them away from the game entirely. They aren't being stupid, they aren't juggling the damned thing in the middle of a firefight. They just have it on their person so they can continue to add to it during their off time.

 

[Maxperson]

D&D worships at the altar of the HP god.

All hail Hewlett Packard! Let us bow our heads...

 

[Maxperson]

I agree with you but for me it's more a matter of me being allowed to play my character. When a skill roll forces me to fall in love with someone, I don't feel like I really have agency over my character. It's nothing to do with negatives. I'm all for negatives in their proper context.

But......this is exactly what I was talking about. You don't feel like you have agency, because you don't. It's a negative and it's one that it seems isn't tenable for you just as it isn't for me.

For other folks who that negative isn't a bad thing, using non-magical compulsion like that is just fine.

 

[Maxperson]

That would be the conservative argument, yes.

No. It would be AN argument. This has nothing to do with conservative or not.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Your argument is that game x and game y create these GAMIST safety features in their games against character death and you are asking why simulationists that value verisimilitude do not accept those rules for their games?

Though as I've noted before there's at best some selective pleading for people who play D&D and object to "gamist" structures; the game is stuffed full of them and was from day one.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Find me any rule in the 5e DMG that talks about an NPC using a social skill on a PC. Just one.

Unnecessary. Find many rule in the 5e DMG that talks about a PC using a social skill on an NPC (using those terms, please). Even so, there's nothing about how the rules work that prevents PCs from being effected.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Oooh boy. Gonna have to completely reject that penultimate sentence of this bit. Death is not a structural necessity. There are plenty of games, including some versions of D&D, that do not have character death. Consider Dragonlance stuff. Very much D&D--but the modules explicitly had rules against deaths for named characters prior to certain events happening. Hence death cannot be a necessity of any kind, structural or otherwise.


Nah. I had a whole thread about this topic a long, long while back (couple years at least now). Death is not the only thing that achieves these goals. It is merely one way to do so. IME, it actually is not the best way, because the extreme severity means a significant number of players turtle up and disengage, becoming no-experimentation, no-risk, no-derring-do types, because they're afraid of having their participation taken away. And no, in my experience, it EMPHATICALLY is not effective to try shock therapy on these folks. Quite the opposite; that's the fastest way to drive them away from ever participating in TTRPGs ever again. Further, because death is simultaneously maximum severity and maximum impersonal-ness (impersonality? hmm), it doesn't really motivate players very well in my experience, other than scaring them off. If you actually want to motivate them, they need a reason to dare, not a reason to be scared of daring--which means other motives are actually a lot more effective. Again, all IME.

So with the very foundation of your argument challenged, it's hard to really respond to the rest. You're working off an assumption I find not only personally inapplicable, but objectively incorrect. There are, in fact, versions of specifically D&D, not just any TTRPG, that involve no-death or minimized-death rules, and yet they still hold together, they still have weighty decisions, they still have meaningful tension, and still have stakes both general and specific. My DW game still has plenty of edge and isn't flat, even though I have told my players that they will never be subject to character deaths that are all three of (1) random (=fluke of the dice, not the result of an intentional incredibly dangerous choice or of accepting one's fate), (2) permanent (=character is dead and isn't going to come back on their own e.g. Gandalf in LotR), and (3) irrevocable (=players will not have the ability to reverse the death in a reasonably short period of time by expending resources or promising something to a being that can do the job.) My players are still highly invested and indeed even the brand-new-to-TTRPG players care a lot about many things in the world, and have done rash or dangerous things to protect who and what they care about.

I can't see DW as a version of D&D.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So you think that that manifesto is your platonic ideal of gaming...but you directly and specifically reject prioritizing the players first?

Bit of a swerve, there. Not sure I can make sense of it.

Don't see the swerve. If I was a player, and I had some special thing important to my PC destroyed through means entirely in keeping with setting logic, than so be it. No one character is so important that something like that can't happen in games I play. Worst case scenario you make a new PC.