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

[hawkeyefan]

You can state your opinion and what you want out of a game without framing it as "moved past" which almost universally means "better". I use skill checks on a regular basis if I'm unsure of whether the argument was unsure, but I'm not going to cast shade on those who don't. There is no one true way.

Right, but we’ve moved past the point where there is a conventional wisdom about this. Because the conventional wisdom aligns with your preferences, perhaps you're not seeing the issue.

It’s not that incorporating social mechanics is better than roleplaying everything freeform… it’s that we’ve moved past the point where “roleplay everything out freeform” is the standard.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I am willing to assume good faith on the part of the GM.

If, and ONLY if, we also assume good faith on the part of the players.

As you can see, far too many people want to have their cake and eat it too on this front. They want to assume that every player is a nasty, grubbing, grabby-hands little gremlin who 100% guaranteed WILL destroy everything they touch unless beaten back. And they want to assume that that beating-back is only, and exclusively, done by GMs who we presume do no wrong.

It's either a presumption of good faith from all parties, or an open field where we must prepare for bad faith from all parties. No special treatment presuming GMs are saints and players are sinners.

I think you're using a considerable amount of hyperbole in your rhetoric (a tactic I'm personally not fond of, but I digress). GMs and players in traditional games have different roles with different degrees of power over the game. A GM has less motivation to act in bad faith I think, because under the rules they can pretty much do what they want anyway. They don't gain anything in play by acting in bad faith (not to say some GMs might behave badly regardless, of course). A player, on the other hand, defines and expands their role in the setting solely through the actions and abilities of their PC (in games I play anyway). They have motivation to try to increase that role by whatever means they can get away with. This doesn't mean they're going to act in bad faith, but often they have reason to do so, for in-game advantage, so it is IMO understandable.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Isn't that the point? That there isn't necessarily conventional wisdom to be offered? That we've moved past the point where the “purpose of a role-playing game” is a bunch of in-character dialogue and thespianism.

That there are other ways to do it would seem to me to be progress. We've moved past that conventional wisdom.

Some people believe that "conventional wisdom" has been moved past, others do not believe that. IMO that's all that can be fairly claimed.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Right, but we’ve moved past the point where there is a conventional wisdom about this. Because the conventional wisdom aligns with your preferences, perhaps you're not seeing the issue.

It’s not that incorporating social mechanics is better than roleplaying everything freeform… it’s that we’ve moved past the point where “roleplay everything out freeform” is the standard.

Is there a standard at all? And if there is, does it matter?

 

[pemerton]

Another possible insight. I will here look at 3 semi-fictious extreme styles of play I am going to shorthand railroady (RRY), sandboxy(SBY) and nary(NY). In all of these playstyles GM has the ultimate responsibility for framing scenes.

In RRY play, the GM don't care about player input at all, but are free to frame scenes according to their own grand vision.
In SBY play the players are responsible to explicitely indicate what their characters are after here and now trough action and intent descriptions. The GM is obligated to take this into consideration when framing the scene.
In NY play the players are responsible to communicate clearly what is important for and about their characters trough character descriptions and other "flags". The GM is obligated to take this into account when framing the scene.

Let us look at a few of the concepts we have been looking at in this thread. Be a fan of the characters are an essential tenet of NY, as that neatly summarises the last GM obligation. However it serve no scene framing purpose in RRY play. For SBY it seem like innefficient/unneccessary advice, as the players are supposed to be explicit about their desires for the new scene trough their actions. The nature of the characters that the fandom is fixated on is not supposed to be taken into account.

Just commenting on this part of your post: in Apocalypse World (and as per the rules text that I posted upthread), Be a fan of the players' characters is as much, or even more, about the narration of consequences than it is about the framing of scenes.

Also, it's not a general principle for narrativist play, nor even for character-focused narrativist play. It's not a principle in Burning Wheel, for instance: BW uses other principles (like the intent + task, the sacrosanct character of success, let it ride, say "yes" or roll the dice, and its basic principles around scene-framing) to do the sort of work that be a fan of the players' characters does in AW.

The "essential tenet" of narrativist play is to have the system generate rising action and conflict across a moral line in accordance with the players' authorship. That's it. I don't understand the apparent longing to find something different from that.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Some people believe that "conventional wisdom" has been moved past, others do not believe that. IMO that's all that can be fairly claimed.

Is there a standard at all? And if there is, does it matter?

A standard would be one true way... which given your tendency to rail against that... or even prescribed methods in many cases... I would think you would view the move past one true way as progress.

No?

 

[pemerton]

does anyone have any examples they could bring to the discussion of how social mechanics are implemented in some games other than DnD? i'm seems they manage to not make it mind control in other systems, or at least i never hear complaints of it being so...

I've posted several examples upthread. Here's a repost from #3352, of a typical sequence of social interactions from my TB2e game.

It began when (in the fiction) the PCs were taken by their captors from the prison cell beneath the Moathouse to meet Lareth the Beautiful (in this campaign, a Half-Elf rather than a human); at the table, this involved free narration by me, probably responding to a few player questions about the environment, before narrating the opening of the meeting with Lareth:

The PCs were then taken to room 11 on the dungeon map (room 28 on the T1-T4 version of the map), where Lareth was waiting to meet them, with four soldiers guarding him. I described the gold chain on the sergeant soldier, and the bejewelled gold chain worn by Lareth, and the PCs were suitably impressed/longing for loot.

Fea-bella introduced the PCs, and then elaborated on her own introduction, as being Lareth's half-sister. Lareth was hesitant to accept this proposition, and so we went into a Convince conflict. Normally this requires equal Precedence, and Lareth, being a priest, is Precedence 3 while the adventurer PCs are Precedence 0, but I decided that in these circumstances Lareth had already deigned to debate the matter with them.

The PCs' goal was to persuade Lareth that Fea-bella is, indeed, his sister, and hence that he should offer them hospitality; Lareth wanted to persuade them to assist him in his cult's mission.

At the start of this conflict Golin decided to sweat out his fever; he recovered from Sick and his Manipulator skill dropped a rank. The PCs won the conflict, with a strong roll (with multiple sixes opened up with Fate) on the second volley, which meant I didn't get to play Lareth's third volley Feint against Fea-bella's Defend! The players nevertheless owed a significant compromise: Lareth accepted the PCs' claim about his relationship to Fea-bella, but the PCs agreed that they would go to Nulb to persuade the pirates there - who raid the river vessels of the Theocracy of the Pale - to tithe to Lareth's cult. Lareth explained the nature of his "order" (as he called it), which involved me reading bits of the background info from T1 but dropping descriptors like "followers of the worst sort" and "depredations", with Lareth instead explaining how the order had attracted the bold and the oppressed, who wanted to free the world from the domination of the Aesir and Vanir, but had been opposed by the religious authorities of the Pale, who had eventually sacked the Temple. (When asked about timelines, he said this was all 40 to 50 years ago, perhaps by coincidence around the time that Golin was born before growing up an orphan in the Forgotten Temple Complex.)

This convince conflict was the fourth turn of the grind, so the PCs were again Hungry and Thirsty. But before Lareth would feed them and let them rest a bit (= camp), he had more to say to them. First he asked Telemere about his brother (and enemy) Kalamere. Telemere politely answered his questions, and established that Lareth and Kalamere are friends, but was refraining from voicing his own true feelings of hatred toward his brother. But Lareth goaded him until he couldn't hold back (failed Manipulator vs Manipulator), making Telemere Angry.

Lareth then turned his attention to Fea-bella. The conversation established that Lareth's father was the wizard Pallando, and his mother (Fella) was an exile from Elfhome. She was exiled because of her role in the theft of the Dreamhouse post by Celedhring, the evil Elf who is now a barrow-wight beneath what was Megloss's house. Lareth explained that Celedhring was Fella's brother (and hence his and Fea-bella's uncle), and that Fella was exiled with him much as, in the ancient times, Galadriel was exiled with her cousin Feanor. "And who is your father?" asked Lareth of Fea-bella.

This caused much discussion among the players - was Lareth implying that Fea-bella was the child of an incestuous relationship between Fella and Celedhring? There was also discussion about where Fea-bella did her dreaming, before she woke, Dream-haunted, and ran off bearing a half-moon glaive. Was this not in the Elf-home Dreamhouse, but rather in Pallando's house?

I suggested that Fea-bella might try a Nature (Remembering ) test, but her player didn't want to - too much grind, and little chance of success. So I resorted to my NPC, and called for another Manipulator vs Manipulator due to Lareth's goading. This time Golin helped Lareth! The test was failed, and so (as a twist) Fea-bella could not help but cast her mind back . . . As her player put it, Fea-bella wanted to remember only happy times of her childhood, with the Elven forest and rainbows and unicorns, and I set this at (I think, from memory) Ob 2. Telemere helped with his own Remembering Nature, and Korvin used Oratory to remind Fea-bella of tales of her childhood she had told her companions. Golin also aided Fea-bella this time, with Dreams-wise.

This test was a success, and so Fea-bella was spared any horrible memories (and the truth about her father remains unknown at this point).

The sequence of events involved both an extended conflict resolution - the Convince conflict - as well as the subsequent single opposed checks, involving the two Elven PCs (Telemere and Fea-bella).

The actual play doesn't record everything that was actually said by the players for their PCs, nor by me for Lareth. In particular, it doesn't spell out what was said for the characters during the extended (Convince) conflict. The key thing in any extended conflict in TB2e is that the actions taken in each volley have to contribute to that character's overall goal in the conflict, and then the consequences established once the conflict is over (via the compromise rules) must follow from what actually happened during the resolution (eg if, during the resolution, someone makes a promise, then a consequence might be that they are obliged to keep it).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Just commenting on this part of your post: in Apocalypse World (and as per the rules text that I posted upthread), Be a fan of the players' characters is as much, or even more, about the narration of consequences than it is about the framing of scenes.

Also, it's not a general principle for narrativist play, nor even for character-focused narrativist play. It's not a principle in Burning Wheel, for instance: BW uses other principles (like the intent + task, the sacrosanct character of success, let it ride, say "yes" or roll the dice, and its basic principles around scene-framing) to do the sort of work that be a fan of the players' characters does in AW.

The "essential tenet" of narrativist play is to have the system generate rising action and conflict across a moral line in accordance with the players' authorship. That's it. I don't understand the apparent longing to find something different from that.

Can someone explain what "moral line" means in this context?

 

[DinoInDisguise]

I think you're using a considerable amount of hyperbole in your rhetoric (a tactic I'm personally not fond of, but I digress). GMs and players in traditional games have different roles with different degrees of power over the game. A GM has less motivation to act in bad faith I think, because under the rules they can pretty much do what they want anyway. They don't gain anything in play by acting in bad faith (not to say some GMs might behave badly regardless, of course). A player, on the other hand, defines and expands their role in the setting solely through the actions and abilities of their PC (in games I play anyway). They have motivation to try to increase that role by whatever means they can get away with. This doesn't mean they're going to act in bad faith, but often they have reason to do so, for in-game advantage, so it is IMO understandable.

Is this fair? Doesn't this reasoning presume bad faith?

The whole argument is built on the assumption that players are trying to get away with things. That they have a desire to exploit for an advantage. But there is no indication that desire is universal or even widespread..

I don't believe that motivation to cheat is inevitable. We can acknowledge the possibility of abuse without preemptively justifying suspicion. That preemptive justification makes it harder to trust players by default. It sets up a default posture of caution and control, rather than trust and shared creative vision.

This is far out of line with my experience in this community. And I think is actively detrimental to the game, by encouraging downstream bad behavior in an effort to mitigate potential bad behavior that likely never occurs.

 

[Micah Sweet]

A standard would be one true way... which given your tendency to rail against that... or even prescribed methods in many cases... I would think you would view the move past one true way as progress.

No?

I suppose to me a "standard" is a method agreed upon, officially or otherwise, by a majority of the people involved. It still allows for other methods.

And yes, I generally don't care about what other people see as standards, unless they're in my game and we're trying to have fun together (and even then the fact that something might be a "standard" is irrelevant to me).